Figure 4.

Mechanisms of steroid synthesis and oocyte maturation in ovarian cells: insights from positional candidate genes identified in the meta-analyses of heifer fertility traits. Receptors for LH and FSH in theca and granulosa cells initiate the signaling cascades for steroidogenesis, follicular growth and oocyte maturation. Proteins in green represent positional candidate genes (within 0.5 Mb of significant SNPs) for which there is also evidence from KEGG pathways. Blue proteins represent positional candidate genes placed in the proposed mechanisms because of current literature (but are not identified in KEGG pathways). Gray proteins indicate the genes that were not positional candidates, but were included based on current literature [67,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89]. Red stars mark genes were in common between this study and previous proteomics and transcriptomics analyses of pre- vs post-pubertal heifers.