In order to investigate the regulation mechanism of the phycocyanin gene, a series of functional analyses of the upstream sequence of cpcB gene from Arthrospira platensis were conducted in E. coli with green fluorescent protein encoding gene (gfp) as the reporter. Results showed that the gfp gene could express at a high level under the promotion of the upstream sequence, suggesting the existence of some strong promoter elements in it. The expression of GFP was influenced by temperature. Higher temperature led to higher expression level. The bioinformatics analyses followed by mutation analyses on the secondary structure of translation initiation region (TIR) revealed that RNA thermosensor might account for the temperature regulation.