Methyl farnesoate (MF) is a sesquiterpenoid hormone that plays a pivotal role in the regulation of metamorphosis and gonad development in crustaceans. MF is the precursor or non-epoxidized form of JH III, the most common juvenile hormone (JH) in insects. Because of the lack of epoxy, which is the target site of juvenile hormone epoxide hydrolase, MF might mainly be degraded by the juvenile hormone esterase (JHE). Juvenile hormone esterase binding protein (JHEBP) binds to JHE and regulates the metabolism of JHE and also play important roles in MF degradation. In this study, we obtained the full-length JHEBP cDNA sequence from the mud crab, Sp-JHEBP was 1,647 bp, with a predicted 891 bp open reading frame (ORF) encoding 296 amino acids with a predicted molecular weight of 33.79 kD. No conserved protein domain was found using the Pfam database, but the Tim44-like domain was relatively conserved in this crab and insects. In addition, the subcellular location prediction suggested that Sp-JHEBP was located in the mitochondria with a high probability, which is consistent with the experimental results in . Phylogenetic analysis revealed that JHEBP was not correlated with the species tree, suggesting that the function of JHEBP might have evolved differentiation with species evolution. Furthermore, the quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction revealed that mRNA was ubiquitously expressed in all of the detected tissues, with the highest expression in the ovary, followed by the gills, hemolymph, and hepatopancreas. During the larval development, the expression of was the highest in fertilized eggs, and increased form zoea I to zoea V, then decreased to the first juvenile crab stage. In addition, the was up-regulated by high concentration of MF (>5 祄ol/L), and was also induced by FA in a concentration-dependent manner from 0.1 to 5 祄ol/L. Taken together, we hypothesized that participates in MF metabolism through the degradation pathway of JHE. This study will promote our understanding of the MF degradation pathway.