Comparative Analysis of Grass Carp Development

The experimental fish used in the experiment were from the Center of Grass Carp Breeding (Jiangsu, China). The tissue samples of grass carp juveniles (n = 15, average weight 40 g, average length 16 cm) were collected, including the brain, muscle, gill, intestine, and heart, and then these tissues were quickly frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored at -80 ℃. Embryos were obtained by artificial insemination spawning. According to the common carp model, the developmental phases of the embryo were split into seven stages and 24 periods, including the zygote, cleavage, blastula, gastrula, neurula, organogenesis, and hatching stages. In this work, we compared the differences in juvenile and embryonic development using hatching stages [66 (link)]. The embryo samples were immediately embedded in RNAlater (TIANGEN) and, after one night at 4 ℃, were stored at − 20 ℃ until RNA extraction. All treatments were performed with three biological replicates to ensure reproducibility of the data.