FIG. 8.

Global impact on the gene expression profile and biological processes of the pituitary by female homozygous thrab 1-bp insertion (m/m) mutant fish. Total RNA was isolated from pituitaries of WT (n = 3) and homozygous thrab 1-bp insertion (m/m) mutant fish (n = 4) for transcriptome analysis. (A) The genes marked in red in this volcano plot were significantly expressed genes with fold changes ≥2 and FDR ≤0.05. The total number of differentially expressed genes was 723, with 642 genes upregulated and 81 genes downregulated. (B) A heatmap presentation of hierarchical clustering analysis of top 50 expressed genes selected by FDR from the significant gene list (fold changes ≥2 and FDR ≤0.05). (C) Comparison of the gene expression profiles of major pituitary hormone transcripts (smtlb, tshba, trhrb, gh1, pomca, and lhb) in the pituitary of WT and homozygous thrab 1-bp insertion (m/m) mutant fish. (D) The mRNA expression levels of the major pituitary hormone transcripts (smtlb, tshba, trhrb, gh1, pomca, and lhb) were measured by RT-qPCR in pituitaries of WT and homozygous thrab 1-bp insertion (m/m) mutant fish (number of fish = 46–62, number of determinations = 3–6). The data are shown as mean ± SE with p-values to indicate significant changes. Two-tail unpaired t-test, p-adjusted <0.05 was used for statistical analysis. (E) Graphical representation of clusters of biological processes with Gene Ontology analysis for the significantly expressed genes. FDR, false discovery rate.