Abstract:  Heat shock proteins are a kind of molecular chaperones， of which structure are highly conserved， and play essential roles in regulating various metabolic processes and molecular signal transduction in animals and plants. In the present study， the HSP70 gene family was investigated based on the results of foxtail millet whole genome sequencing. The conservation of the sequence， distribution of conserved motifs， structure of introns and exons， distribution of family members in chromosome were analyzed as well as their phylogenetic relationships. It was shown that there were at least 25 gene members existed in the foxtail millet genome with protein sequence length varying from 295 to 851 aa. Sequence alignment showed that there were 10 conserved motifs existed in foxtail millet genome with a range of 17 to 50 aa， indicating that these genes were highly conserved. Genes structure analysis showed that the number of introns among these genes ranged from 0 to 8， and half of family members contained 3’ and 5’ UTR. Moreover， these HSP70 gene family members distributed in chromosome 1， 2， 3， 4， 5， 6， 7 and 9 in foxtail millet unequally. Phylogenetic analysis showed that there were high degrees of variation among these family members. This study not only will help us understand the origin and evolution of this gene family， but also lay the foundation for function analysis of the gene family members.

Key words: foxtail millet, heat shock proteins, bioinformatics, genetic diversity