Skip to main content
Figure 3 | BMC Evolutionary Biology

Figure 3

From: Both selective and neutral processes drive GC content evolution in the human genome

Figure 3

Analysis of GC content distribution in human introns with different isochoric location. Isochore definition is as described in [20]. (A) Scatter plot and loess fitting of intron size and GC content in light (blue) and heavy (red) isochores. (B) Analysis of GC200 (see text). GC200 significantly increases or decreases with residual size (percentile classes are shown) for introns located in heavy (red; breaks in bp = 681, 934, 1309, 1960, 3665) or light (blue; breaks in bp = 810, 1181, 1714, 2638, 5476) isochores, respectively (Kruskall Wallis Test, p = 1.3 × 10-34 and 7.9 × 10-7, respectively). The number of introns in each size class amounted to 2490 and 1567 for heavy and light isochores, respectively. (C) Distributions of within-gene correlation coefficients. For each gene having more than 15 introns (n = 500 and 1021 for light and heavy isochores, respectively) we calculated correlation coefficients between masked GC content and residual size. Hatched and dotted lines represent envelopes (1st and 99th percentiles, respectively) of correlation coefficient distributions obtained by randomization. (D) Scatter plot and loess fits of GC content over intron size (log10 values) for introns (upper panel) and pseudointrons (lower panel). Spearman correlation coefficients (rho) are also shown (all p values were < 0.01). Introns and pseudointrons were divided on the basis of their isochoric location: blue for light isochores (501 introns-pseudointrons pairs), red for heavy ones (926 pairs).

Back to article page