Cloning Of Pepper CaJERF1 Gene And Preliminary Studies On Its Function

Adverse environment conditions such as pathogen attack, drought and extreme temperature greatly impair crop growth and development. They even may lead plant to death. In order to study the molecular mechanism of plant resistance to adverse conditions, we cloned an ethylene response factor-CaJERFl from pepper using RACE technology. The sequencing results showed that the full length of the cloned cDNA is 1379bp, including a contact ORF(open reding frame) which encode 375 amino acid. We found that it contains a conserved ERF domain which contains 59 amino acids through analysis of its amino acid sequence. A domain rich of K and R amino acid was found, we deduced that it may be the NLS domain. And a section of function unknown amino acid sequence was found in N-terminal, it is similar to LeERF2 which was found recently and belongs to the IV subfamily of ERF family.According to the analysis,we think CaJERFl may be a transcription fator which localized in nucleus and activate transcription.However, the evolution tree based on the AP2 domain shows that CaJERFl have closer relationship with JERF1, RAP2. 2, RAP2.12 which belongs to B2 subfamily.In the interest of realizing which signal transduction pathway CaJERFl participate in, we treated four week old pepper with ethylene, SA, MeJA, NaCl and low temperature, and observed the changes of the expression of CaJERFl during different time point. The result is that ethylene, MeJA, NaCl and low temperature affect the expression of CaJERF1, and SA has little influence. According to this result, we think that CaJERFl may play important roles in ethylene-jasmonate and abiotic transduction pathways, and it may be cross-talk of the two pathways.Besides, we also construct a Prokaryotic Expression vector used PET-28a(+) expression vector, and it may be useful for further research and analysis of CaJERF1.