Abstract:Bainong?male sterility(BNS)is an efficient thermo-photo-sensitive genic male sterile line of wheat(Triticum aestivum). BNS is sterile in low temperature and fertile in high temperature. With these features, BNS was widely used in hybrid wheat breeding. In this study, based on the gene chip data of the anthers of BNS sterile line and fertile line, we found that the transcription factor TaERF7 was differentially expressed between the two lines, and cloned the cDNA and promoter sequences of TaERF7. Bioinformatics analysis revealed that the coding sequences(CDS)of TaERF7 is 660 bp and encoding of 219 amino acids. TaERF7 protein contains AP2 domain and two EAR motifs. It belongs to class II Ethylene response factors (ERFs). The amino acid sequence of TaERF7 is homologous to Arabidopsis(Arabidopsis thaliana)AtERF4, which is a transcriptional repressor. The promoter region contained multiple cis-acting elements with light and low temperature response. Prokaryotic expression results showed that TaERF7 protein had good solubility in water. The best concentration of IPTG induction was 0.5 mmol/L, and the best Imidazole Elution concentration was 50 mmol/L for protein purification. The qRT-PCR results showed that TaERF7 expressed in different tissues of BNS. In young spikes at anther separation stage and anthers at meiosis phases, TaERF7 was up-regulated in sterile lines and down-regulated in fertile lines. TaERF7 was differentially expressed in anthers of BNS across with different sowing dates. Along with this, we analyzed TaERF7 response to several temperatures and daylight hours. The results showed that the expression of TaERF7 was down-regulated 0.47 fold under long daylight(14 h), while it was up-regulated 1.14 fold under short day(10 h). The low temperature treatment at 4°C increased the expression of TaERF7 about 25.7 fold in 2 h, and maintained a high level upto 48 h. The high temperature treatment at 37°C increased the expression of TaERF7 about 0.71 fold in 1 h, but it was sharply down-regulated to 0.85 fold after 2 h. According to the above results, we believe that the up-regulated expression of TaERF7 in anther seperation and meiosis stage may cause the male sterility in BNS.