Abstract: Phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL) plays a crucial role in phenylpropanoid metabolism and provides precursors of various phenylpropanoid compounds. The 1 334 bp 5′upstream region of the gene encoding phenylalanine ammonia-lyase was isolated from Jatrapha curcas L. by the DNA walking technology. Sequence analysis revealed that the PAL promoter sequence contains not only CAAT and TATA basic modifs that are conserved in the eukaryotic gene promoter, but also various stress related cis-acting elements. Especially, many cis-elements observed in other phenylalanine ammonia lyase promoters are also found in the JcPAL promoter. For further study on the relationship of organization and function of JcPAL promoter, four JcPALP fragments with different deletion regions were inserted into vector pBI121(with GUS report gene) to replace CaMV35S promoter and might be used to investigate their corresponding expression pattern.

Key words: phenylalanine ammonia-lyase, promoter, Jatropha curcas, DNA walking technology