Figure 1.
Operon Encoding of Protein Complex Subunits Enhances the Efficiency of Assembly
(A) Comparison of assembly for heterodimers where different subunits are encoded by different transcriptional units and where genes encoding both subunits are present on the same operon.
(B) Correlation (Spearman’s ρ) between abundance measurements from subunit pairs encoded by different transcriptional units or by the same operon. The correlation for subunit pairs encoded by the same operon is significantly higher than for those encoded by different transcriptional units (p = 0.002), as calculated by randomly shuffling the pairs between two groups of the same size 105 times.
(C) Comparison of protein abundance measurements for subunits from operon-encoded complexes versus other subunits from complexes encoded by different transcriptional units. Boxes represent quartile distributions, and whiskers extend up to 1.5× the interquartile range. The p value was calculated with Wilcoxon rank-sum test.
Figure S1 shows these comparisons using protein abundance measurements combined from multiple organisms and with E. coli protein synthesis rates.