Cloning and characterization of TaUCHs in wheat.

In order to study the mechanism of salt tolerance in plants,a 219 bp cDNA fragment sharing high similarity with ubiquitin C-terminal hydrolase was obtained by cDNA-AFLP in previous work. Based on this fragment,two full length cDNAs were cloned via silico cloning,RACE and RT-PCR, and named as TaUCH1 and TaUCH2 respectively.They are almost identity except for an amino acid difference in the open reading frame.Conserved domain prediction indicated that there are C19 peptidase domains both in the middle and at the C-terminal of the two proteins.Phylogenetic analysis indicated that TaUCH1 and TaUCH2 share 88%similarity with their homologous proteins in rice. Southern blot revealed that TaUCHs consist of multiple copies or a gene family in wheat.These results indicated that TaUCHs are the real ubiquitin C-terminal hydrolase genes in wheat and may involve in the degradation of some damaged proteins or important regulators during plant stress.