Shen Lirong

CLONING AND SEQUENCING OF GENE ENCODING HYALURONIDASE FROM THE VENOM OF APIS CERANA CERANA

Abstract The venomous hyaluronidase (Hya) gene of Chinese honey bee, Apis cerana cerana, was amplified by RT‐PCR from total RNA of venom glands of the worker bees. The full length of its nucleotide is 1164 bp encoding a 387 amino acid polypeptide with predicted molecular weight of 42.6 kD. The alignment of AcHya amino acid sequence with other 6 Hyas shows that AcHya is most closely related to the Hya of European honey bee, A. mellifera, with 91% amino acid identity. It also shares homology with Hya of Dolichovespul amacidata, Polistes annularis, Vespula vulgaris, Lutzomia longipalpis and Homo sapiens (sperm), with 54%., 52%., 46%, 27% and 20% amino acid identity, respectively. A phylogenetic tree of those hyaluronidases was drawn by using GENETYX program, the conservation, the relationship between molecular structure and function of 7 hyaluronidases as above was compared and analysed.