Epidermal growth factor(EGF)plays important roles in growth, wound healing and metamorphosis, etc. The pearl oyster Pinctada fucata is a commercially important species cultured for pearl production, in which a series of developmental transformation occur in young stage and an injury will happen during nuclear insertion. In order to evaluate the function of EGF gene during P. fucata larval development, tissue growth and nuclear insertion. In this study, cloning and expression of an EGF-like gene was carried out to provide some background for further study on growth development and pearl culture improvement. As a result, a full length cDNA of 4 107 bp was obtained and named Pf-egf1. The complete ORF encoded 234 amino acid residues, including a signal peptide, a transmembrane domain and an EGF-like domain. The EGF-like domain contained six cysteines that can form three disulfide bonds, consistent with the characteristics of Epidermal Growth Factor protein family. However, the remaining Pf-egf1 sequences were quite different from other EGF family members. So we speculated that Pf-egf1 is probably a novel EGF-like gene. The tissue expression profile showed that Pf-egf1 expressed in all the six tissues tested(mantle, muscle, gill, hepatopancreas, pearl sac, intestines and gonad), with significantly higher expression in intestines than in other tissues. The expression of Pf-egf1 presented an increasing trend from trochophore stage to metamorphosis stage in larval development, with significantly higher expression in metamorphosis stage than in other stages. The observations above indicated that Pf-egf1 gene may play important roles in intestine repairing and larval metamorphosis in P. fucata, possibly through promotion of cell proliferation, and thus can benefit to some extent further studies on modulation of growth and pearl culture.