Journal of Tropical Oceanography ›› 2020, Vol. 39 ›› Issue (3): 66-75.doi: 10.11978/2019074CSTR: 32234.14.2019074

• Marine Biology • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Cloning and expression analysis of aquaporin gene AQP4 cDNA from Pinctada fucata martensii

Xiaolan PAN1,2,3, Huiru LIU1,2,3, Meng XU1,2,3, Hanzhi XU1,2,3, Hua ZHANG1,4, Maoxian HE1,4()   

  1. 1. CAS Key Laboratory of Tropical Marine Bio-resources and Ecology, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou 510301, China
    2. Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Applied Marine Biology, Guangzhou 510301, China
    3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
    4. Institution of South China Sea Ecology and Environmental Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou 510301, China
  • Received:2019-08-19 Revised:2019-11-28 Online:2020-05-10 Published:2020-05-19
  • Contact: Maoxian HE E-mail:hmx2@scsio.ac.cn
  • Supported by:
    The Earmarked Fund for Modern Agro-industry Technology Research System(CARS-49);Marine Ecological Civilization Project(ISEE2018PY03);Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangdong Province, China(2017B0303014052)

Abstract:

Aquaporin 4 (AQP4) is a major channel that passively transports water. In this study, based on a fragment of AQP4 of Pinctada fucata martensii obtained by transcriptome sequencing, the full cDNA was obtained using RACE technology, named PfAQP4, which includes 114 bp of 5'UTR, 839 bp of 3'UTR, and 858 bp of the Open Reading Frame (ORF) encoding a total of 285 amino acids. The PfAQP4 has six alpha-helix transmembrane regions, five loops, one major intrinsic protein (MIP) domain, and two NPAs (Asn-Pro-Ala) motif, indicating that it belongs to AQP1-like type. Real-time fluorescent quantitative PCR was used to analyze the mRNA expression pattern of PfAQP4 in different tissues, different developmental stages, and different salinity stress conditions. The results showed that: (1) PfAQP4 was expressed in all tested tissues, and its expression level was higher in adductor muscle, foot, and gill; (2) in different developmental stages, PfAQP4 was increased first and then decreased, highly expressed in the 2-4 cell stage and lowly expressed in eye-spot larva stage; (3) the expression of gill PfAQP4 mRNA in hypersaline group (36‰) increased significantly at 24h, 72h, and 120h, and returned to the control level at 168 h; in the hyposaline group (16‰), PfAQP4 was significantly up-regulated at 24 h, and the expression level returned to the control level at 72h. These results showed that the salinity can affect the expression of PfAQP4 in gill, and PfAQP4 had a very important effect on the osmoregulation of P. f. martensii.

Key words: Pinctada fucata martensii, aquaporin 4, salinity stress, osmoregulation