Figure 2

Frequency of exon skipping and abundance of wholly intronic noncoding transcription in RefSeq genes. (a) Distribution of exon skipping events along spliced RefSeq genes with 7, 8, 9 or 10 exons. Filled squares indicate the average frequency of skipping per exon for genes with evidence of TIN RNAs mapping to their introns. Open squares indicate the average frequency of skipping per exon for genes with no evidence in GenBank that TIN RNAs map to their introns. A significantly higher (p < 0.002) frequency of exon skipping was observed for RefSeq genes with TIN RNA transcription. (b) Distribution of TIN transcripts among the introns of RefSeq sequences with 7, 8, 9 or 10 introns selected from GenBank as being outside the 95% confidence level of significance (not correlated) in a Pearson correlation analysis between the abundance of TIN contigs per intron and the intron size (in nt). Bars indicate the average intron size (nt) for this selected set of genes. Triangles indicate the number of TIN contigs per intron for RefSeq genes for the same set.