Molecular cloning and analysis of Myc modulator 1 (Mm-1) from Bufo gargarizans (Amphibia: Anura)

The protein of Myc modulator 1 (Mm-1) has been reported to repress the transcriptional activity of the proto-oncogene c-Myc in humans. Moreover, it was shown to be the subunit 5 of human prefoldin (PFD). So far, this gene and its homologs have been isolated and sequenced in many organisms, such as mammals and fish, but has not been sequenced for any amphibian or reptile. In order to better understand the function and evolution of Mm-1, we isolated a full-length Mm-1 cDNA (BgMm-1, GenBank accession no. EF211947) from Bufo gargarizans (Cantor, 1842) using RACE (rapid amplification of cDNA ends) methods. Mm-1 in B. gargarizans is 755 bp long, comprising an open reading frame (ORF) of 459 bp encoding 152 amino acids. The amino acid sequence had a prefoldin -like domain, partially including a typical putative leucine zipper motif. BgMm-1 showed high similarity to its homolog of Mus musculus Linnaeus, 1758 (82%) and Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758 MM-1 isoform (81%) at the amino acid level. The protein secondary structure modeled with the SWISS MODEL server revealed that there were two -helices and four -strands in BgMm-1 as its human orthologue, and both proteins belonged to the class of PFD family. The phylogenetic relationships of Mm-1s from lower archaea to high mammals was consistent with the evolution of species, meanwhile the cluster result was consistent with the multiple alignment and the sequence identity analysis. RT-PCR (reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction) analysis demonstrated that BgMm-1 expressed widely in ten tissues of adult toad. These results can be helpful for the further investigation on the evolution of Mm-1.