Fig. 2.

Genes in the pathways linked to multigenic diseases are, on average, longer and have more splice variants. a Distribution of L^tr in each of the 186 KEGG pathways, in the ascending order of the L^tr median values. The horizontal dashed line in (a) denotes the 200 k-nt threshold for a transcript length, known to be relevant in defining the topoisomerase-dependent transcription of the genes that are longer [7]. L^tr values are calculated for each unique gene, taking the length of the longest transcript, prior to splicing. b The fraction of genes (in an ascending order) with number of transcripts greater than 3 in each of the 186 KEGG pathways. The names of the KEGG pathways, ordered in the way corresponding to the indices in x-axes, can be found in Notes S1 and S2 in Additional file 1 for the plots (a) and (b). The cancer-linked pathways are highlighted in red, as opposed to blue for the rest. Some pathways from the rest, still related to cancer or other multigenic diseases are indicated with arrows