Figure 3.

(A) PCA of individuals from different morphological stages. Individuals at T2 and T3 showed similar expression patterns (they were merged to be the development stage S2). (B) Heatmap of gene expression patterns from morphological stages T1 to T4. (C) Venn diagram of DEGs derived from development stage S2 compared to S1, S3 to S2, and S2 to S1. (D) qPCR verification of bulk RNA-seq results. All 5 genes (BMP4, CA4, FGF10, SMAD9, and WIF1) followed a similar expression pattern of RNA-seq. The X-axis represents different developmental stages, and the Y-axis represents the relative expression levels. Different uppercase or lowercase letters refer to significant differences with P values <0.05 or <0.01, respectively. Error bars indicate standard errors.