Hepcidin gene is widely expressed in various fish, suggesting that this antimicrobial peptide is a very important component in the innate immune system.Grouper (Epinephelus tauvina) is one of the important economic species of marine-cultured fish but knowledge of its innate immune mechanism is lacking.In this study, we found two different types (designated Hep-ET1 and Hep-ET2) of hepcidin cDNA in the grouper.They consist of an open reading frame of 267and 263 bases encoding 88 and 87 amino acids respectively and both have a conserved sequence in common with other known hepcidins.