Cloning and sequence analysis of Actin gene fragment from Reaumuria soongorica

Actin gene is the most common and important house-keeping gene for analyzing plant functional gene expression patterns. In the present study, the total RNA was extracted from the shoot of salt-secreting super xerophyte Reaumuria soongorica, degenerate primers were designed based on the conserved nucleotide sequences of the Actin genes from other higher plants. Actin gene fragment was obtained by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). The sequence analysis indicated that the Actin gene fragment from R. soongorica contained 598 bp, encoding 198 amino acid residues. Multiple alignment with Actin gene sequences from other plants in the GenBank showed that Actin gene fragment from Reaumuria soongorica had over 82% nucleotide sequence similarity and over 90% amino acid sequence homology with other plants. These results indicated that the cloned gene was Actin gene fragment, which was named as RsACT. The phylogenetic tree reconstructed based on the amino acid sequences suggested there might be most closed relationship between RsACT and the actin from Gossypium hirsutum and Populus trichocarpa.