ISOLATION OF Β-ACTIN PROMOTER DERIVED FROM WALKING CATFISH (CLARIAS BATRACHUS)

Abstract

Fish growth improvement as economic traits can be solved through fish transgenic production. Growth hormone gene is inserted into transgenic vector construction to over-express fish growth. The promoter as a part of the expression vector has an important role in its regulation. The use of promoter which is derived from mammalian or virus (such as CMV/ cytomegalovirus) in the expression vector, in specific goal as food material, has customer resistant rather than a promoter which is derived from in- sibling species. Beside of it, transgene expression level when using in-sibling promoter showed higher than using mammalian or viral promoter. The β-actin promoter is screened from walking catfish pituitary genome DNA using primers: pBA-cy-F (5’- GTGWGTGACGCYGGACCAAATC-3’) as forward primer and pBA-cy-R (5’- CCATRTCRTCCCAGTTGGTSACAAT-3’) as reverse primer, produced an amplicon of 1,7 kb in length. Sequence analysis using TF BindTM indicated transcription factor elements: TATA box, CCAAT box, enhancer (CAAT), and CarGG (CAAATGG) motif. This result showed that promoter which is obtained from this research is useful in construction of all catfish growth hormone vector expression catfish transgenic production. Keywords: β-actin promoter, growth hormone, expression vector, walking catfish (Clarias batrachus)