Abstract:Telomerase is a ribonuclear protein complex with reverse transcriptase activity in eukaryotic cells, with significance on maintaining DNA integrity at the ends of eukaryotic linear chromosomes. The telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) is the key subunit of telomerase. Currently, researches on characterization of the TERT promoter is mainly focused on tumor cells, and studies of plant TERT promoter remain unclear to date. In this study, we applied bioinformatic tools to investigate the TERT promoters of Arabidopsis thaliana and other plants, performed the phylogenetic analysis with TERT promoter sequences, and analyzed the TERT gene expression through semi-quantitative RT-PCR. The results showed that the TERT promoter was highly conserved on sequence similarity in the same group of plants. The TERT gene promoter has several regulatory elements related associating to drought, salt and hormone were found. By RT-PCR analysis, the transcription level of AtTERT in Arabidopsis mutants were always lower than in wild type under normal and stress conditions. In relative to the wild type, the AtTERT mutants became more sensitive under high salt and drought conditions, but no visible difference under abscisic acid (ABA) and high temperature. Taken together, our results verified the prediction of cis-acting elements of the AtTERT gene promoter, which might be important in responses to salt and drought stresses.and The preliminary result suggestedily proved that the AtTERT promoter regulates the AtTERT gene transcription expression of AtTERT, providing an important reference for the future research on revealing the expression mechanism of this gene.