Functional Characterization of Two Isoforms During Ovarian Development in .

In this study, we identified two isoforms ( and ) in through bioinformatics analysis and characterized their phylogenetic relationships. The open reading frames of and were 1641 bp (encoding 546 amino acids) and 1473 bp (encoding 490 amino acids), respectively. Both isoforms exhibited high conservation, sharing five identical functional domains, with 58.43% amino acid sequence similarity. Quantitative PCR analysis revealed that expression was significantly higher than across all developmental stages and tissues. During embryonic development, showed elevated expression at the ZS, L15, and PL10, while was upregulated only at L15 and PL10. In the breeding season and non-breeding season, and were predominantly expressed in the hepatopancreas at levels significantly higher than in other tissues. Moreover, their expression in most tissues was higher during the breeding season than in the non-breeding season. experiments revealed that knockdown of both isoforms significantly accelerated ovarian development in , with the -silenced group exhibiting faster progression than the -silenced group. These results demonstrate that genes function as negative regulators of ovarian maturation, with exerting a stronger inhibitory effect than .