Cloning and sequence analysis of chicken interferon-α gene

Chicken interferon-α (ChIFN-α) was amplified from chicken splenic lymphocytes by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) technique. The cDNA fragment containing coding region of ChIFN-α gene was cloned into the pMD18-T vector and sequenced. The sequence analysis showed that the length of the open reading frame (ORT) was 582 bp. Compared with the ChIFN-α gene sequences available in the GenBank, the homologies of the nucleotide sequences were 98.6%～99.8%. Further analysis of the ChIFN-α gene sequences from different countries and territories showed that the lengths of ORF and encoded amino acids were uniform, and the characters of territory-related changes were not found.