Construction of a complete bovine growth hormone cDNA

The aim of the project was to construct a complete BGH cDNA under control of a plant promoter. This could then be transformed into plants to study its expression. The N and C-terminus of bGH cDNA were excised from two plasmids constructed by ICI (pBGH 17.2, pBGH 229 respectively), and fused together in PUC8 to obtain a complete cDNA. The complete bGH coding sequence can be excised from pUC8 by EcoRI + HindIII digestion and cloned into Bin19, together with a suitable promoter. In this work, a "complete" bGH cDNA clone was constructed but unfortunately, a potential small deletion at the N-terminus of the CDNA bGH clone was observed. This could subsequently affect correct expression of the gene. It is not certain wether this deletion occured in the course of this work or through previous manipulation during the construction of pBGH 17.2 at ICI. This question is currently being resolved by ICI.