Amplification and Analysis of the Partial cDNA Sequence of UCP1 Gene in Tupaia belangeri

Uncoupling protein-1 (UCP1) is a kind of heat producing protein, which distributes on the inner membrane of mitochondria. Its main function is to maintain the body's energy metabolic balance by participating thermogenic regulation and energy metabolism in BAT. In this study, we designed primers and used reversing transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). This experiment successfully obtained 444 bp BAT UCP1 cDNA core fragment of tree shrews, and we speculated that the amino acid sequence were 148 amino acids. After structure-function analysis, we found that fragment composed of these amino acid possessed 32 bp homologous sequence of UCPs and 13 bp specific sequence of UCP1 in Tupaia belangeri. After the comparison of amino acid sequence ho- mology, the results showed that the UCP1 homology between tree shrews and other animals like Mus musculus, Rattus norvegicus, Cricetulus griseus, Oryctolagus cuniculus, Equus caballus, Felis ca- tus, Bos taurus, Odobenus rosmarus, Pongo abelii and Ailuropoda melanoleuca was respectively 80%, 81%, 82%, 86%, 85%, 86%, 89%, 87%, 83% and 88%. UCP1 coding region showed higher conser- vation in mammals, suggesting that UCP1 plays an important physiological role in vertebrates.