Fig. 2

Activation of maturation candidate genes and regulatory factors in the pituitary-gonad axis (A), Heat map of key biological candidates with significant expression changes in pituitary and ovary during onset of maturation. The clustering shown was obtained by comparing the normalised expression values (log₂-transformed and mean-centered FPKM values). The red-blue scale represents the relative expression values (B), Model of genes implicated in activation of the pituitary-ovarian axis in Atlantic salmon and their potential roles during maturation onset. Panel B was adapted from [32, 33] (C), Key transcription factors (TFs) with regulatory potential identified based on co-expression with DEGs at T4 using RIF metrics. The Venn diagram shows overlap of these TFs among the three tissues. The heatmap shows normalized expression of top10 factors per tissue ranked based on their RIF scores