Figure 2. Antisense transcription is associated with changes in chromatin structure in both yeast and humans, but not with changes to the level of sense transcription.

• A
  The average levels of sense and antisense transcription determined for both HeLa and Saccharomyces cerevisiae using NET‐seq, HeLa using GRO‐seq and S. cerevisiae using PRO‐seq. For each trio of panels, the left panel shows average levels around the sTSS, the right panel shows the average levels around the asTSS, and the middle panel shows the average level within thirty equal sized bins within the region bound by the sTSS and asTSS. In all cases, levels of transcription on the sense strand are shown in red, while levels on the antisense strand are shown in blue. Genes considered are those which contained an asTSS, as defined in Fig 1.
• B
  The average levels of nucleosome occupancy determined for both HeLa and S. cerevisiae using MNase‐seq. Panels are grouped in threes and show average levels as in (A). The top panels compare two sets of genes—those with high levels of sense transcription (dark red), and those with low levels (pale red). The bottom panels show those genes with high levels of antisense transcription (dark blue), and those with low levels (pale blue).
• C, D
  Scatter plots comparing the number of sense and antisense NET‐seq reads within the 300 bp window shown, in both HeLa cells and S. cerevisiae, for those genes with both an sTSS and asTSS. Shown for both species is the Spearman correlation coefficient, r _s.
• E
  Boxplots showing the distribution of gene compaction in different sets of S. cerevisiae genes. Gene compaction was determined by summing the number of intragenic contacts, measured by Micro‐C, and dividing by gene length. On each boxplot, the central mark indicates the median, and the bottom and top edges of the box indicate the 25^th and 75^th percentiles respectively. The whiskers extend to the most extreme data points. The numbers at the bottom of each box plot show the number of genes in that group.