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Pak. J. Bot., 45(2): 507-512, 2013.

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MOLECULAR AND COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF NEWLY ISOLATED BETA-TUBULIN PARTIAL GENE SEQUENCES FROM SELECTED MEDICINAL PLANTS

SITWAT AMAN¹, MUNEEZA IQBAL¹, SAFDAR ABBAS¹, SADIA BANARAS², MUHAMMAD AWAIS¹, IMTIAZ AHMAD¹, ZABTA KHAN SHINWARI² AND SAMINA N SHAKEEL^1*

Abstract: Dynamic nature of beta tubulin (β-tubulin) gene is unleashed by recent studies reporting that apart from being a reliable reference gene serving for normalization purposes in gene expression analysis, β-tubulin encodes for structural proteins playing important role in cell cytoskeleton, microtubules and regulation of cell networking. This study is focused on the identification, isolation and characterization of 6 novel β-tubulin genes isolated from diverse range of 6 medicinal plants including Ficus carica, Pisum sativum, Capsicum annum, Capparis decidua, Maytenus royleana and Eruca sativa. The genomic sequences of newly isolated β-tubulin genes were analyzed and confirmed by using different bioinformatics tools followed by submission to genebank. We used ClustalW for pairwise alignment of these novel sequences with other known 18S rRNA sequences to find out their phylogenetic relationships. Our results have shown conserved nature of β-tubulin with some variable regions might be landmarks of some historical signals. Being housekeeping gene, β-tubulin can be used as good marker and internal control for several types of molecular analysis followed by validations of their consistent expression in the several plant species in future. This study will provide a platform for the molecular biologist interested in studying novel mechanisms of different medicinal plants.

¹Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Biological Sciences, Quaid-i-Azam University 45320, Islamabad, Pakistan

²Department of Biotechnology, Faculty of Biological Sciences, Quaid-i-Azam University 45320, Islamabad, Pakistan

^*Corresponding author’s e-mail: snq28@yahoo.com