Hongwei Liu , Qi Tang , Yanfang Yang , Nan Zhang , Deyou Qiu

1. The Research Institute of Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Beijing, 100091, P.R. China
2. State Key Laboratory of Tree Genetics and Breeding, Beijing, 100091, P.R. China
3. Guangxi Branch Institute, Institute of Medicinal Plant Development, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Nanning, 530023, P.R. China
Author    Correspondence author
Medicinal Plant Research, 2012, Vol. 2, No. 1   doi: 10.5376/mpr.2012.02.0001
Received: 01 Feb., 2012    Accepted: 13 Mar., 2012    Published: 16 Mar., 2012

This article was first published in Molecular Plant Breeding (Vol.10, No.1, 62-66) in Chinese, and here was authorized to translate and publish the paper in English under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Liu et al., 2012, Casbene Synthase Gene Cloned from Euphorbia fischeriana Steud., Medicinal Plant Research, Vol.2, No.1 1-5 (doi: 10.5376/mpr.2012. 02.0001)

Casbene synthase may play an important role in the biosynthesis of tigliane type terpenoid. Casbene synthase gene, named as EfCS (GenBank accession number JN862821), was cloned from the root of Euphorbia fischeriana Steud. using RACE-PCR method. The fragment was 1 969 bp in length and contained an open reading frame coding a polypeptide of 602 amino acids, with a typical structure of terpenoid synthase gene. With biochemical analysis of the amino acid sequence coding by CS gene, the results indicated that the theoretical isoelectric point of CS was 5.36 and the molecular weight was 69.3648 kD. By hydrophobic analysis, we found the overall performance of CS was hydrophilic. The lead peptide analysis revealed that the peptide had a chloroplast guide sequence. Secondary structure prediction showed that this CS protein was composed with α-helix, extended chain, β-turn and random coil, which accounted for 64.95%, 6.64%, 3.16% and 25.25%, respectively. Protein tertiary structure prediction showed that EfCS, the casbene synthase obtained in this study, belonged to class I terpene synthase.

Euphorbia fischeriana; Casbene synthase