Cloning, expression, and polymorphism of the porcine calpain10 gene

Calpains are calcium-regulated proteases involved in cellular functions that include muscle proteolysis both ante- and postmortem. This study was designed to clone the complete coding sequence of the porcine calpain10 gene, CAPN10, to analyze its expression characteristics and to investigate its polymorphism. Two isoforms of the CAPN10 gene, CAPN10A and CAPN10B, were obtained by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and rapid amplification of cDNA ends methods combined with in silico cloning. RT-PCR results indicated that CAPN10 mRNA was ubiquitously expressed in all tissues examined and, with increasing age, the expression level increased in muscles at six different growth points. In the same tissues, the expression level of CAPN10A was higher than that of CAPN10B. In addition, three single nucleotide polymorphisms were detected by the PCR-single-stranded conformational polymorphism method and by comparing the sequences of Chinese Min pigs with those of Yorkshire pigs. C527T mutation was a missense mutation and led to transforming Pro into Leu at the 176th amino acid. The results of the current study provided basic molecular information for further study of the function of the porcine CAPN10 gene.