Background: Krüppel-like factor 7 (KLF7) has been extensively studied in the mammalian species, but its role in avian species is not clear.Additionally, the evolutionary pattern of KLF7 genes in vertebrates remains unclear.Methods: The sequence of the promoter and coding region (CDS) of chicken KLF7 (gKLF7) were getting by cloning and sequencing.The luciferase assay was conducted to locate the gKLF7 promoter.The alignment was done using the Align X in the Vector NTI Advance 11 (Invitrogen).The neighbor-joining phylogenetic tree analysis was conducted using MEGA4.The Genomicus software program was used to identify syntenic genes.And the Blat analysis was conducted using the online software program of UCSC.Results: The cloning and sequencing result showed that the full-length CDS of gKLF7 is 891 bp long.And luciferase assay indicated the sequence (-2270/-70) before the CDS of gKLF7 has a promoter activity.The structure analysis indicated that, the gKLF7 protein contains: the acidic domain (aa 1-47), the three C2H2-type zinc fingers domain (aa 215-296) and the hydrophobic S-rich domain (aa 76-205), as well as a nuclear localization signal motif (NLS ; aa 206-212).A phylogenetic analysis performed using the full-length vertebrate KLF7 protein sequences and the sea urchin KLF7 protein sequence (GenBank ID: NP_001189420) as an outgroup suggests that the protein sequences of KLF7 genes in the bird, lizard and mammalian species were highly conserved, and the two Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) KLF7 genes, KLF7-1 (GenBank ID: XP_003453228) and KLF7-2 (GenBank ID: XP_003454956), were orthologous to the zebrafish KLF7a and KLF7b, respectively.Additionally, the Blat analysis indicated that the different transcript variants in chimpanzee and dog were resulted from the different transcript starts and modifications after transcription, respectively.Furthermore, syntenic analysis suggested that two copies of KLF7 gene in the teleost, KLF7a and KLF7b, appeared integrated into one single gene before or around the amphibians radiation, and the KLF7 syntenic group appeared more conserved in the higher animals.Conclusions: In this study, we confirmed the existence of gKLF7, and revealed the KLF7 gene evolution pattern in the vertebrate .