Morphological characterization and transcriptome analysis of gills in golden pompano (Trachinotus ovatus) with opercular deformities

The golden pompano (Trachinotus ovatus), one of the most important economic fishes in marine culture in China, is easily influenced by external environmental changes in its early development stage, resulting in a high probability of skeletal deformities, of which opercular deformity is a common type. The opercular deformity leads to the exposure of the gill chamber to water, which may have some adverse effects on gill function, but there is no research in this field at present. Therefore, in this study, the golden pompano with unilateral opercular deformity was taken as the research object, and the effects of opercular deformity on the morphological characteristics and gene expression of the gills of oviparous pompano were studied by histological methods such as Hematoxylin-Eosin (HE) and TdT-mediated dUTP nick-end labeling (TUNEL), as well as transcriptome sequencing techniques.