Figure 3.

Mechanisms of gonadotrophins secretion in the pituitary gland: insights from positional candidate genes identified in the meta-analyses of heifer fertility traits. GnRH after binding to its receptor activates multiple signaling pathways including calcium, cAMP and growth factor signaling to express and secrete FSH and LH. Proteins in green represent positional candidate genes (within 0.5 Mb of significant SNPs), which were also reported in respective KEGG pathways. Blue proteins represent positional candidate genes integrated here because of current literature cited (but are not known from KEGG pathways). Grey proteins indicate the genes which were not listed as positional candidates, but are components of the proposed mechanisms due to known pathways or current literature [14,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77]. Red stars identify proteins from this study which are in common with previous proteomics and transcriptomics analyses of pre- vs post-pubertal heifers.