Cloning and sequence analysis of porcine interleukin-18 gene

After porcine PBMC was stimulated by LPS and PHA, pIL-18 gene was amplified by reverse transcription and polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) in the present study. The sequence analysis showed that the nucleotide sequence of the pIL-18 gene cloned in the study shares 100% homology with that published in GenBank and differences significantly from human, mouse, cow, chicken, dog, horse, rat, sheep and turkey IL-18 gene’s sequences, which were published in GenBank.