Figure 4. Global processing patterns and relative abundance of sdRNAs and miRNAs expressed in prostate (cancer) tissues.

(a) Full-length C/D-box snoRNAs are aligned relative to the middle nucleotide of each sequence. (b) H/ACA-box snoRNAs are aligned based on the position of the H-box. (c) Pre-miRNAs are aligned relative to the middle nucleotide of each sequence. A green line represents each full-length sncRNA. Sequences are extended 10 nt at each end to avoid mapping ambiguity caused by incorect annotation. Positions of detected conserved H/ACA-boxes or C/D-boxes are shown in blue and red. Light and dark grey lines indicate the positional origin of sdRNAs, miRNAs and miRNAs*. The color intensity corresponds to the relative abundance of sncdRNAs originating from the same precursor (read-count as a percentage of the total read-count per precursor), e.g. if only one sdRNA per snoRNA-precursor is detected it is assigned 100% abundance, if two or more sdRNAs originate from the same snoRNA the sdRNA with the highest read-count is given the darkest color and the sdRNA with the lowest read-count - the lightest. Thin dashed lines separate each panel into three subgroups where sncRNAs producing only one sncdRNA are on top, sncRNAs producing two sncdRNAs are in the middle and those producing there or more sncdRNAs are on the bottom. The highly sequentially conserved, multiple gene-copy C/D-box snoRNAs from the SNORD116 (HBII-85) and SNORD115 (HBII-52) families are grouped together below other C/D-box snoRNAs. The X-axis indicates the position of sncdRNAs relative to the center of their precursor sequence. The Y-axis depicts the number of full-length sncRNA precursors.