Cloning and Expression Analysis of Actin Gene Gragment from Elsholtzia haichowensis

Cloning and expression analysis of Actin gene fragment from Elsholtzia haichowensis would provide foundation for the study of gene expression and regulation of heavy metal resistance related genes. Degenerate primers were designed based on the conserved sequences of the Actin genes from other plants. Total RNA was extracted from the root of E. haichowensis. An Actin gene fragment was separated by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction(RT-PCR). The sequence analysis results revealed that Actin gene fragment from E. haichowensi contains 576 bp, encoding a protein of 192 amino acids. Homology comparison with other plants Actin gene sequences in the GenBank showed that it shared 84%-97%amino acid sequence homology with other plants. The cloned sequence was Actin gene fragment. It was named as EhACT and was registered into GenBank(accession number:AGT37260). Semi-quantitative PCR assays indicated that the expression of EhACT in root, stem and leaf of E. haichowensis was relatively stable, suggesting that EhACT can be used as the reference to analyze the gene expression in E. haichowensis.