Abstract:

MAPK（mitogen-activated protein kinase）genes play a crucial role in the plant response to
stress. In this study，the full-length of cDNA and genome sequence，and the promoter sequence of
CsMAPK3 were isolated from the tea plant（Camellia sinensis）cultivar‘Fudingdabai’. Moreover，the
characteristic of bioinformatics and the expression patterns of CsMAPK3 under different stress treatments
were investigated. The full-length cDNA of CsMAPK3 was 1 700 bp，with a 1 119 bp ORF，encoding 373
amino acids（Accession No. MF034662）. It was predicted that CsMAPK3 was a hydrophilic protein，
containing multiple phosphorylation sites. The homologous alignment and phylogenetic tree analysis
showed that CsMAPK3 had a CD domain in the C-terminal region and conserved in TEY motif，which
belongs to the group A of MAPKs. Subcellular localization prediction suggested that CsMAPK3 could be
located in both the cytoplasm and the nucleus. The genome sequence of CsMAPK3 was 4 930 bp in length and constituted by five introns and six exons；thereinto，the first and the second intron were 1 608 bp and
1 318 bp in length，respectively，which were longer than other introns，whereas the length of the exons was
ranged from 130 bp to 350 bp. Moreover，we cloned a promoter sequence of CsMAPK3 which was 1 125
bp in length，and contained several stress-responsive elements involved in drought，cold，high temperature
and ABA-signaling. Expression analysis showed that ABA，cold and salt treatments could significant
up-regulate the expression of CsMAPK3. Protein interaction network prediction showed that CsMAPK3
could interact with MYBR1 resulted in responsing to abiotic stress in ABA-dependent pathway. In
conclusion，CsMAPK3 might be correlated to the abiotic stress-responsive in tea plant.

Key words: Camellia sinensis, MAPK3, abiotic stress, gene cloning