The Experimentally Determined Relative Recombination Tolerance of Five MSV Genomic Regions Is Highly Correlated with Values Inferred from Nature

<p>We used the quadratic regressions presented in <a href="http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0010051#pgen-0010051-g002" target="_blank">Figure 2</a> to derive experimental estimates of similarly tolerable degrees of RID in the five genomic regions over a range of Ti values between 0.99 and 0.70 (290 values at 0.01 intervals). Using a range of Ti values avoids any biases that might occur due to inadvertently choosing particularly poor/favourable Ti values for estimating similarly tolerable degrees of RID from the experimental data. For example, the set of similarly tolerable degrees of RID calculated when Ti = 0.9 is 15.3%, 8.3%, 2.7%, 3.3%, and 3.8% for the SIR, <i>MP</i> gene, <i>CP</i> gene, LIR, and <i>Rep</i> gene, respectively. Each of the 290 sets of values thus determined was linearly regressed against the set of values for the maximum tolerable RID inferred for the same five regions from an examination of natural recombinants (15.0%, 7.7%, 3.2%, 5.4%, and 3.9%, for SIR, <i>MP, CP,</i> LIR, and <i>Rep,</i> respectively). <i>R</i>² values determined for these 290 regressions are plotted against their corresponding Ti values (solid line). The correlation is significant (broken line = <i>R</i>² value corresponding to a <i>p</i>-value < 0.01) over the Ti range 0.95–0.7 (Pearson's <i>R</i>² > 0.96, <i>p</i> < 0.01; Spearman's rho = 0.9, <i>p</i> = 0.037).