FIGURE 7.

Functional similarity between gene pairs as a function of sequence similarity of their transcripts. The functional similarity is based on the measure described by Wang et al. (2007). Shown is the mean similarity with respect to the three parts of the Gene Ontology (biological process, molecular function, and cellular component). Red circles correspond to the set of 207 gene pairs with predicted antisense covariation (referred to as network nw2 in Fig. 2); from this set only 115 gene pairs are plotted, the nonplotted gene pairs correspond to cases for which the functional similarity could not be computed due to missing functional annotation (n= 115, mean sequence similarity: 69.51%, mean functional similarity: 0.88). Blue triangles represent the randomized version of network nw2 (n= 98, mean sequence similarity: 31.60%, mean functional similarity: 0.39). The sequence similarity is based on a pairwise alignment of gene transcript nucleotide sequences using the MUSCLE software (Edgar 2004).