Abstract

Aimola Idowu Asegame, Inuwa Hajia Mairo, Nok Andrew Jonathan and Mamman I. Aisha

The -globin gene cluster contains the - globin gene on which the substitution of the 17th nucleotide gives rise to sickle cell anemia and other -globin gene variants with varying severity. Recent therapy measures focus on understanding the structure and mechanism of expression of the -globin gene. In this study, we attempted to isolate a gene fragment containing the complete set of the human -globin gene cluster from AA, AS and SS blood types, using the restriction enzyme BamHI which has a recognition site within the 19-kb 3’ cluster region downstream the - globin gene cluster. DNA fragment size of 69.65 kb was generated by the enzyme from the genome of AS and SS blood types while the fragment generated from the AA blood type was 70.28 kb. Fragments generated using Bam HI was all comparable and close to the documented size of the -globin gene cluster. In addition to the 69.65 kb fragment generated from the DNA from SS blood type, a novel 5.73 kb fragment was also visualized which was absent in the lanes containing restricted DNA from the AA blood type.