Abstract:

【Objective】 The aim of this experiment is to study the mechanism of functions generation and to find the novel functional genes in the alpaca skin. 【Method】 The skin tissue was got from a white young alpaca. The cDNA library was constructed with SMART, from which 13 800 clones were selected at random to be sequenced. All sequences were treated to be high quality ones, which were assembled to be consensus sequences with CAP3, further aligned with BLAST to be annotated and clustered with CLUSTER. According to the Gene Ontology (GO) and classification standard of gene expression profile of human tissue, genes were classified to construct the gene expression profile. 【Result】 7 286 high quality sequences were generated from the alpaca skin cDNA library with 106 PFU, which were deposited by dbEST in GenBank (GenBank name:ASCD). With CAP3, 5 837 consensus sequences were assembled, including 446 contigs and 5 391 singleton. BLAST searches produced 1 732 novel genes representing new transcripts. Clustering analysis of the annotated sequences allowed 4 968 unigenes. The results showed that the significant characteristics were the highest level of the transcripts of transcription and translation system and higher level of some single genes such as Procollagen typeI. Additionally, some putative genes related to alpaca fleece quality, growth and color were found. 【Conclusion】 This is the first time to construct the alpaca skin cDNA library and its gene expression profile, from which much gene information reflecting the physiologic characters and functions of the white young alpaca skin were obtained. The construction of the cDNA library is a useful resource for finding new genes.

Key words: alpaca, cDNA library, gene expression, skin