Fig. 2.

Identification of cell cycle activity as the dominant source of transcriptional heterogeneities in the HSC compartment. a Identification of highly variable genes in Bcl11a ^+/+ (upper panel), sBcl11a ^+/+ (middle panel) and Bcl11a ^−/− (lower panel) HSCs. The expression variability of individual genes measured by the squared coefficient of variation (CV²) is plotted against the mean expression level (normalized counts). Magenta points indicate mouse genes (Bcl11a ^+/+, 6597; sBcl11a ^+/+, 7716; Bcl11a ^−/−, 5503) showing higher than expected expression variability compared with external RNA spike-ins (blue) (adjusted p value <0.1). The red line is the fitted line of the spike-ins and the dashed line marks the margin for genes with 50 % biological CV. b The top 20 gene ontology terms enriched in the highly variable genes among Bcl11a ^+/+ (upper panel), sBcl11a ^+/+ (middle panel) and Bcl11a ^−/− (lower panel) HSCs. The p value was adjusted by the Benjamini and Hochberg method for multiple testing