Abstract: This study was to clone CS-3 gene for the first time with its expression in different tissues, and predict its protein structure and fuction, so as to analyze the meat quality traits associated with. The results showed that CS-3 of ovine was 838 bp in length with an open reading frame (ORF) 735 bp long and encoded 244 amino acids,and there were three conserved domains in amino acids sequences. Bioinformation analysis indicated its secondary structures mainly were random coil and helical regions, and contained rich hydrophobic regions, certain phosphorylation sites and protein kinase C (PKC) sites. Meanwhile, tissue expression of the gene in Liangshan semi-fine wool sheep were analysed, results showed that it was expressed in heart and muscle. When the ovine was of fifteen-days age,the expression was the highest in heart, and there was very significantly different between heart and other internal organ tissues(P＜0.01). Furthermore, the expression of CS-3 decreased with the rise of the age and became the highest when the ovine was at sixty-days age in heart.

Key words: ovine; CS-3 gene; cDNA clone; tissue expression