Correlation of gene expression and allelic ratios across ten somatic tissues.

<p>(<b>A</b>) Shared patterns of gene expression were detected for tissues with shared functional roles or embryonic origins. For example, the small intestine and colon are both digestive system organs derived from the endoderm and have a high degree of pairwise correlation (Spearman Correlation, <i>R</i> = 0.92). Likewise, the frontal lobe and cerebellum, which are both vital tissues nervous system derived from the ectoderm, have a high degree of shared expression (<i>R</i> = 0.91). The hierarchical clustering was generated using pairwise Spearman correlation coefficients of FPKM expression values for all genes. (<b>B</b>) Shared patterns of ASE were detected by mmPCR-Seq. The concordance of ASE between tissues does not as strongly reflect the relationships seen for shared gene expression or shared embryonic origin. The allelic ratio is calculated as the alternate allele reads divided by the total reads. Each data point represents a single heterozygous site tested for ASE with a total read depth greater than 200. The plots are colored by the degree of correlation of allelic bias between the pairwise tissues. These results indicate that relationships of allelic expression across tissues are much more complex than those of total expression level.