The tree shrews, as an ideal animal model receiving extensive attentions to human disease research,
demands essential research tools, in particular cellular markers and monoclonal antibodies for immunological studies. In
this paper, a 1 365 bp of the full-length CD4 cDNA encoding sequence was cloned from total RNA in peripheral blood of
tree shrews, the sequence completes two unknown fragment gaps of tree shrews predicted CD4 cDNA in the GenBank
database, and its molecular characteristics were analyzed compared with other mammals by using biology software such
as Clustal W2.0 and so forth. The results showed that the extracellular and intracellular domains of tree shrews CD4
amino acid sequence are conserved. The tree shrews CD4 amino acid sequence showed a close genetic relationship with
Homo sapiens
and
Macaca mulatta
. Most regions of the tree shrews CD4 molecule surface showed positive charges as
humans. However, compared with CD4 extracellular domain D1 of human, CD4 D1 surface of tree shrews showed more
negative charges, and more two N-glycosylation sites, which may affect antibody binding. This study provides a
theoretical basis for the preparation and functional studies of CD4 monoclonal antibody.