Molecular cloning and phylogenetic analysis of small GTPase protein Tscdc42 from Trichinella spiralis

A full-length of complementary deoxyribonucleic acid ( Tscdc42 ) encoding a putative Rho-family small GTPase gene cdc42 was isolated from Trichinella spiralis, an economically important parasitic nematode of zoonosis. The uninterrupted open reading frame of TsCDC42 encodes a predicted protein of 147 amino acids and containing a highly conserved domain of CDC42. Comparison with selected sequences from the free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans , Drosophila melanogaster , Xenopus laevis, Danio rerio , Mus musculus , and human showed that Ts cdc42 is highly conserved. The highest identity of TsCDC42 with CDC42 from Drosophila is 67%, the similarity is up to 73%, the identity of TsCDC42 with the CDC42 homologue of C. elegans is 62%, and the similarity is up to 71%. Phylogenetic analysis of the amino acid sequence data, using the neighbor-joining and maximum parsimony methods, revealed that TsCDC42 is closely related to the molecule inferred from the cdc-42 gene of C. elegans . The transcript of TsCDC42 was analyzed during different stages of the worm.