Cloning of a polyubiquitin gene fromNicotiana tabacum and comparison to other polyubiquitin genes

Using a tobacco cDNA clone as a probe, a genomic clone named TUQG-4, coding for a tobacco polyubiquitin protein with the five head-to-tail repeats of ubiquitin monomer was isolated. The five ubiquitin units were completely conserved except for the extra phenylalanine at the carboxy terminus of the last ubiquitin monomer. The putative open reading frame identified from the nucleotide sequence showed two possible intron sequences in the coding region for the first ubiquitin monomer. When the amino acid sequence deduced from the nucleotide sequence of TUQG-4 was compared to the amino acid sequences coded by other polyubiquitin genes of tobacco, there were three or four amino acid differences in the sequence. When the nucleotide sequences coding for the ubiquitin monomers were compared for various species origins, the degree of identity was at the highest between the ubiquitin monomers in one polyubiquitin and did not reflect the distance of the phylogenetic relationship.