Figure 3

Changes in mRNA degradation rates are correlated for genes that share an intergenic region. (a) Schemes of the three neighboring gene-pair architectures. (b-e) Changes in mRNA degradation rates in response to stress were calculated using two data sets: one that used transcription inhibition [10] (b,c) and one that used metabolic labeling [9] (d,e). Consecutive gene pairs were binned according to their co-expression across a wide range of expression values [27] (b,d) or according to the length of the intergenic region (c,e). It is important to note that the correlation in expression, used to divide pairs according to their co-expression, is calculated over a very large set of samples (>1,700) resulting in expected low correlations even for genes that are co-expressed in some conditions. We chose the binning such that each bin contains roughly the same number of genes. Color indicates the gene-pair architecture (divergent, convergent and tandem). Spearman rank correlations are shown for each bin and each architecture demonstrating both the higher correlation for divergent pairs and the dependency on both the intergenic region length and the general tendency for co-expression.