Figure 3.

Overlapping sets of essential and indispensable genes in model eukaryotes. BLASTP comparisons were performed using <e−30 as a significant match. Circle sizes are proportional to numbers of genes: 1,682 C. elegans genes with an RNAi phenotype (Kamath et al., 2003); 1,009 essential genes of S. cerevisiae (Giaever et al., 2002); and 800 indispensable genes of Arabidopsis. Numbers represent matches (e.g. 357 worm genes with an RNAi phenotype have at least 1 match among yeast essentials and 1,247 have no match in either the yeast or Arabidopsis datasets). Numbers in white represent genes with matches in all 3 datasets. Differences in reciprocal comparisons (e.g. 115 yeast genes with an Arabidopsis match; 88 Arabidopsis genes with a yeast match) reflect different levels of sequence redundancy and sizes of datasets.