Abstract:The arginine kinase in Heortia vitessoides was obtained by screening the adult H.vitessoides transcriptome database and named HvAK (GenBank:MH794282).Bioinformatic analyses of HvAK and expression of HvAK at various developmental stages and larval tissues were performed.The role of HvAK gene in the growth and development of H. vitessoides was studied by detecting the expression level of HvAK under high temperature and low temperature stress.The results showed that the HvAK cDNA contains an open reading frame with 1 068 bp,encoding a protein with 355 amino acid.Result of homologous alignment showed that the highest homology between HvAK and AK gene of Bombyx mori was 94.10%.The results of real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) showed that HvAK was expressed in all larval tissues and developmental stages tested,with the highest expression of HvAK in the head and in the 5th instar larva.Both high and low temperature induced upregulation of HvAK expression,indicating that HvAK gene may be involved in resisting adverse external environment during H. vitessoides growth and development.