Abstract:Plant heat-shock proteins are representative proteins that respond to high temperatures and play an important role in regulating plant growth and development and resisting adversity. In this study, HSP17.7 gene from Solanum tuberosum was cloned by RT-PCR and bioinformatic characters were analyzed. The expression of level of StHSP17.7 gene under high temperature stress was analyzed by qRT-PCR. The results showed that: (1) Full-length sequence of StHSP17.7 gene was 755 bp. It contains an open reading frame of 465 bp and 154 amino acids were encoded. (2) The StHSP17.7 gene encoding protein was a hydrophilic protein with molecular weight of 17.62 kD and the isoelectric point is 7.91. The functional structure domain analysis showed that the C-terminal of the protein contained an ACD domain consisting of conserved sequence Ⅰ and conserved sequence Ⅱ, typically belonging to the sHSPs family member. (3) Phylogenetic analysis showed that sHSPs of Solanum tuberosum was clustered into 12 subfamilies. The StHSP17.7 protein was closely related to the HSP17.6 protein of Solanum tuberosum, and belongs to the family of small heat shock protein C I. Gene structure analysis showed that among 48 StHSPs genes from Solanum tuberosum, StHSP17.7 gene does not contain intron, and other 23 genes contained one introns, accounting for 47.9% of all the genes in the family. (4) qRT-PCR analysis showed that StHSP17.7 gene expression was rapidly induced by high temperatures, and the gene expression level showed an explosive change, reaching the highest value in 24 h. The results suggest that StHSP17.7 gene is very sensitive to heat stress and may play an important role in response to high-temperature stress in potatoes.