Fig 2. Change in gene expression profile during ESC neural induction.

A) Global unsupervised clustering performed on the entire pool of 19,204 genes indicates that, at the transcriptional level, ESCs and NESCs are two distinct cell populations. Red boxes highlight reproducible clusters that are strongly supported by data (Bootstrap Probability value ≥95%). B) Heat map of the subset of 2,413 genes that change their expression levels in ESCs as compared to NESCs (at False Discovery Rate <0.01 and absolute FC level ≥2). Expression levels are presented as row-wise standardized values (log₂ fold change). C) Functional enrichment of the 2,413 differentially expressed genes obtained using DAVID GO annotation. Upper plot reports the GO categories associated to genes up-regulated in ESCs, while in the lower plots are the functional enrichment of genes over-expressed during neural induction, i.e. in NESCs.