Molecular characterization and in-silico analysis of the cDNA encoding conglutinin from sheep liver

Abstract

Conglutinin, known to be the high molecular weight serum lectin, appears to play an important role in bovine immune defense mechanisms, by binding to microbial surface carbohydrates thereby inducing aggregation and preventing the spread of pathogens. Though there is very limited information regarding the presence of this gene in small ruminant like sheep, also till date no study has revealed the sequence information of conglutinin in sheep. However the present study depicts the cloning and characterization of the cDNA sequence of 497bp encoding conglutinin (neck and carbohydrate recognition domain) from sheep for the first time and edited sequence of 488bp was submitted to NCBI with accession number JQ692170. Moreover sequence information revealed that nucleotide sequence of sheep conglutinin was 93.4% homology to the bovine conglutinin, 93.9% to buffalo conglutinin, 93.4% to nilgai conglutinin, 81.6% to CL–43 and 90.2% to CL-46 respectively; also liver is known to be the organ for the presence of this novel gene in this small ruminant for first time. In addition the present study also revealed the sequence analysis of the sheep conglutinin using DNA star, phylogenetic analysis using Mega 4.0.2 and secondary structure prediction by using online software
like SWISS MODEL ProtParam.