Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

January 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Isolation, Characterization, Mapping And Expression Analysis Of Porcine Tissue Kallikreins

Samodha, C. Fernando¹ , Bruce, A. Roe² , Rodney, D. Geisert¹ , Udaya DeSilva¹

¹  Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078

²  University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019

Kallikreins are members of a multigene family of serine proteases that are widespread throughout living organisms. They are found in diverse tissue specific patterns and are known to have highly diverse physiological functions. To gain insight into the structure and evolutionary origins of the kallikrein gene region in the pig, we have isolated several BAC clones containing members of the porcine tissue kallikrein gene family and constructed a BAC clone based Physical map of the porcine greater kallikrein gene region.. We have also mapped the kallikrein gene region to porcine chromosome 6q1.2.
Sequence analysis of the greater kallikrein region has revealed the presence of 13 kallikrein genes in the porcine genome, among which 11 are novel porcine kallikrein genes. Furthermore, as a first step towards understanding the tissue specific expression patterns of the pig kallikrein gene family members, we have performed a global expression analysis of all porcine tissue kallikreins. We have also conducted quantitative real-time PCR based, expression analysis of porcine kallikreins to evaluate the expression of tissue kallikreins in the porcine endometrium and conceptus during the estrous cycle and early embryonic development to better understand the role of kallikreins in placental development and embryonic survival in the pig.