[Cloning and expression of the pig skeletal muscle musclin gene].

We found seven tag sequence with high homology in dbEST by using human musclin gene, and got its cDNA sequence, which consists of 651bp and the open reading frame was 54-452 bp detected by RT-PCR, encoding 132 amino acid residue protein. The new gene has high homology with that of human, mouse and rat, the rate is 87.2%, 77.6% and 77.9%, respectively; the gene fragment was cloned into expression vector pGEX-4T-1, and the recombinant was transformed into E. coli BL21. Induced by IPTG, the fusion protein GST-musclin, a 38.59 kD protein was successfully expressed in E. coli BL21 and identified by Western blotting.