Most fish farms are located far from hatcheries, making the transportation of fish larvae or juveniles from hatcheries to rearing farms an important process. Although optimum stocking densities for the transportation of some marine fish are available, very little is known about the transportation of hatchery-produced juvenile Crimson snapper Lutjanus erythropterus.</p><p>A total of 270 healthy L. erythropterus juveniles of similar size (length= 12.0 cm weight= 10.0g) were randomly collected from the hatchery and kept in live fish transport plastic boxes containing 3 L of well-aerated seawater at five different stocking densities (D1= 20 g/L (6 fish/ box) D2= 40 g/L (12 fish/ box) D3= 60 g/L (18 fish/ box) D4= 80 g/L (24 fish/ box) D5= 100 g/L (30 fish/ box)), each with 3 replicates (n= 270).</p><p>Transportation experiments were conducted at an average speed of 30 km/h, simulating actual transport conditions, and lasted 8 hours.</p><p>Total RNA was extracted from the liver of L. erythropterus juvenile using 1 mL of Trizol reagent (Invitrogen) according to the instruction of the manufacturer. The quality and integrity of the isolated RNA were evaluated using a Nanodrop R ND-1000 spectrophotometer (LabTech, Holliston, MA) and 1.5 percent (w/v) agarose gel, respectively. The extracted RNA was then reverse transcribed into cDNA and sequenced using the Illumina HiSeqTM 2300 platform (Illumina, San Diego, USA).