CLONING AND EXPRESSION ANALYSIS OF A NOVEL AMMONIUM TRANSPORTER GENE FROM EICHHORNIA CRASSIPES

Abstract

In order to explore the molecular mechanism for Eichhornia crassipes to transport ammonium from outside, we cloned a novel ammonium transporter (EcAMT) gene from E. crassipes and identified its function by using yeast complementation experiment. The full-length cDNA of EcAMT contains a 1506 nucletide-long open reading frame which encodes a protein of 501 amino acids. Bioinformatics analysis predicted that EcAMT had 8 transmembrane regions. The expressions of EcAMT gene under three different nitrogen conditions were evaluated by quantitative reverse transcriptase PCR (qRT-PCR) and the results showed that the expression of EcAMT gene was up-regulated under nitrogen starvation. Our study results revealed some molecular mechanism of E. crassipes to absorb the ammonium in eutrophic water.