Table 1

Primers information"

Table 2

Results of transcriptome sequencing data quality assessment"

Fig. 1

Results of transcriptome analysis of silver fox and red fox A. PCA analysis of the two sample groups: YS represents the silver black fox group, and CS represents the red fox group; B. Volcano plot of DEGs in the YS group vs. CS group; C. Clustered heatmap of DEGs: the x-axis indicates sample names, and the y-axis indicates DEGs. Different colors represent different gene expression levels, where red indicates highly expressed genes and blue indicates lowly expressed genes"

Fig. 2

Results of GO functional and KEGG pathway enrichment analysis of DEGs A.GO functional enrichment analysis of DEGs: the x-axis represents the number of genes, and the y-axis represents GO categories; B.KEGG pathway enrichment analysis of DEGs: the x-axis represents the enrichment factor, and the y-axis represents pathways"

Table 3

GO enrichment results of DEGs related to coat color formation"

Table 4

KEGG pathway enrichment analysis results of DEGs related to coat color formation"

Fig. 3

Comparison of qRT-PCR and RNA-seq results of DEGs The x-axis represents group, the y-axis (left, bar chart) indicates the relative genes expression levels determined by qRT-PCR, and the y-axis (right, line graph) shows the FPKM value of genes detected by RNA-seq"

Fig. 4

Proteomics analysis results A. Volcano plot of DEPs in YS vs. CS groups; B.Clustering heatmap of DEPs: x-axis represents sample names, y-axis represents DEPs. Different colors indicate protein expression levels, with darker colors showing higher expression and lighter colors showing lower expression"

Fig. 5

Results of GO and KEGG enrichment analysis of DEPs A.GO enrichment analysis of DEPs: the x-axis represents the number of proteins, and the y-axis indicates GO categories; B.KEGG pathway enrichment analysis of DEPs: the x-axis represents the negative logarithm of the statistical significance of protein expression levels, and the y-axis shows pathway. The size of the circles indicates the number of genes enriched in the respective pathways, and different colors represent the enrichment factor"

Table 5

KEGG pathways related to coat color formation"

Fig. 6

Results of NRAS and HRAS protein expression assays A.Western blot. B.Comparison of Western blot and proteomic analysis results: x-axis represents proteins, y-axis (left, bar chart) shows relative expression levels of NRAS and HRAS measured by Western blot, and y-axis (right, line graph) shows expression levels measured by proteomic analysis"

Fig. 7

Transcriptome and proteome association analysis A.Comparative analysis of genes and proteins in Venn plots; B. Scatter plot of 9-quadrant analysis of associated genes and proteins: x-axis and y-axis indicate multiple differences (log2FC) in protein and mRNA abundance, respectively"

Table 6

Overlapping DEGs and DEPs with consistent expression trends"

Fig. 8

Network diagram of protein interactions Yellow indicates differential genes; blue indicates differential proteins; red indicates overlapping genes for transcriptome and proteome association analysis"

Fig. 9

Regulation of melanin synthesis process in fox skin The red colour in the graph indicates genes with higher expression in the skin of the silver fox compared to the red fox, and the green colour indicates genes with lower expression"