Cloning and Sequence Analysis of Metallothionein-III in Goat

In this study,a pair of special primers(MT-ⅢSP1 and MT-ⅢSP2) were designed for cloning the coding sequence of metallothionien-Ⅲ(MT-Ⅲ) from brain tissue in goat.The MT-Ⅲ coding sequence in goat were 207 bp.The goats MT-Ⅲ gene sequences had been submitted to GenBank under accession numbers EF471976.Goat MT-Ⅲ gene coded 68 amino acids,including 19 Cys residues.Goat MT-Ⅲ had characteristic MDPET,C-X-C,C-C-X-C-C,C-X-X-C and KKS sequences of MTs,where X was non-cysteine amino acids.The amino acids sequences of goat shared 99.5%,98.6%,89.4%,88.5%,88.2%,88.2% and 83.8% sequence similarity with cattle,sheep,dog,pig,human,rhesus monkey and mouse,it showed that the MT-Ⅲ was very conservative.The phylogeny of MT-Ⅲ from nucleotide and amino acids sequence were same,and was also consistent with the result of morphology and physiology.