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HEREDITAS(Beijing) ›› 2012, Vol. 34 ›› Issue (6): 749-756.doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1005.2012.00749

• en • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Cloning and functional analysis of SCTF-1 encoding a C2H2-type zinc finger protein from soybean

SONG Bing1,2, WANG Pi-Wu1, FU Yong-Ping1, FAN Xu-Hong3, XIA Hai-Feng1,4, GAO-Wei4, HONG Yang1, WANG He1, ZHANG Zhuo1, MA Jian1   

  1. 1. College of Agriculture, Jilin Agricultural University, Changchun 130118, China 2. Jilin City Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Jilin City 132101, China 3. Soybean Research Center, Jilin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Changchun 130033, China 4. Tonghua Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Tonghua 135000, China
  • Received:2012-02-09 Revised:2012-03-02 Online:2012-06-20 Published:2012-06-25

Abstract:

The zinc finger protein is one of the proteins with finger-like domain. Some of them are transcription factors which play important role in plant growth and plant resistance to abiotic stresses. In this paper, a novel C2H2-type zinc finger protein gene SCTF-1 (GenBank accession number JQ692081) was isolated from soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.) This gene has a 699 bp ORF (open reading frame) with no in-tron and encodes a 24.9 kDa protein with 233 amino acids. Its isoelectric point (pI) is 8.33. The SCTF-1 protein contains two typical C2H2-type zinc finger domains. Both of them have highly conserved amino acid sequence-QALGGH which is a particular characteristic of plant. Transient expression of the GFP-SCTF-1 protein in onion epidermal cell showed that SCTF-1 was localized in cell nuclei. RT-PCR results showed that SCTF-1 gene was expressed with high levels in flowers and leaves in soybean, but low in roots and stems. The expression of SCTF-1 gene was strongly induced by low temperature in the soybean seedlings. Overexpression of SCTF-1 enhanced cold tolerance of transgenic tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) compared to the control.

Key words: soybean, zinc finger protein, C2H2-type, SCTF-1 gene, subcellular localization, cold tolerance