Molecular cloning and mRNA expression analysis of myosin heavy chain (MyHC) from fast skeletal muscle of grass carp, Ctenopharyngodon idella

The myosin heavy chain (MyHC) is one of the major structural and contracting proteins of muscle. We have isolated the cDNA clone encoding MyHC of the grass carp, Ctenopharyngodon idella. The sequence comprises 5 934 bp, including a 5 814 bp open reading frame encoding an amino acid sequence of 1 937 residues. The deduced amino acid sequence showed 69% homology to rabbit fast skeletal MyHC and 73%-76% homology to the MyHCs from the mandarin fish, walleye pollack, white croaker, chum salmon, and carp. The putative sequences of subfragment-1 and the light meromyosin region showed 61.4%-80% homology to the corresponding regions of other fish MyHCs. The tissue-specific and developmental stage-specific expressions of the MyHC gene were analyzed by quantitative real-time PCR. The MyHC gene showed the highest expression in the muscles compared with the kidney, spleen and intestine. Developmentally, there was a gradual increase in MyHC mRNA expression from the neural formation stage to the tail bud stage. The highest expression was detected in hatching larva. Our work on the MyHC gene from the grass carp has provided useful information for fish molecular biology and fish genomics.