Isolation of partial β-tubulin gene from Balakka (Phyllanthus emblica L.)

Abstract

Balakka is a medicinal plant with the ability to thrive in arid environments. Despite its potential, Balakka has not been fully utilized in Indonesia due to a lack of information about the plant, including the β-tubulin gene. The β-tubulin gene is a crucial gene in living organisms, frequently used as an internal control or as one of the housekeeping genes that maintain stable expression throughout development. The objective of this study was to isolate and determine the sequence of the β-tubulin gene in Balakka (Phyllanthus emblica L.). Total RNA was extracted from Balakka and converted into cDNA, which was then amplified using β-tubulinG primers. The amplification resulted in a fragment of 252 bp. Bioinformatics analysis revealed a 92% nucleotide similarity with the β-tubulin gene 5 of Ricinus communis, and the fragment was referred to as the partial β-tubulin gene from Phyllanthus emblica (PeTUB). A phylogenetic relationship analysis based on the nucleotide sequence indicated that the partial PeTUB gene grouped with β-tubulin gene 5 from other plants in GenBank, with a genetic distance of 0.082.