Fig. 2

Comparison of female, male and cyp17a1 KO brain transcriptomics. Zebrafish were maintained in a recirculating system in the Wuhan lab. Zebrafish at 90 dpf were anesthetized, and brain samples from wild-type females, wild-type males, and cyp17a1 KO males were isolated. The sex was determined by examining the gonadal samples under the microscope. The brain samples were sent to NanJing Personal Gene Technology Co., Ltd., for transcriptomic analysis. Raw data were assessed for quality control using FastQC (v0.11.5). Adapter sequences were removed using Trim Galore (v0.4.3). The zebrafish reference genome (GRCz11/v104.11, Apr.2018) and the reference Index (the GTF file) were downloaded from Ensembl. First, hisat2-build was used to index the reference genome, and then HISAT2 (version 2.2.4) was used to map the reads to the reference genome. Finally, the gene counts were summarized with feature Counts (Subread software, v 2.03). The differential expression analysis was performed with the DESeq2 package (v1.30.1) using a fold change of 2 and a p value cutoff of 0.05. All the differentially expressed genes are presented in Additional file 1: Table S1. Hierarchical clustering of DEGs was performed in R (version 4.1.2) using the heatmap package. Venn diagram (A), heatmap (B), PCA (C), and dendrogram (D). Three independent biological replicates were used and for each biological replicate, four brain samples were pooled. F, female, M, male, K, cyp17a1 KO