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. 2018 Jan 23;7:e30649. doi: 10.7554/eLife.30649

Figure 6. Gene significance and network position implicate MAPK11 as a molecular entry point to vocal learning mechanisms.

(A) The 20 genes with the highest to lowest gene significances to tutor similarity (sorted from top to bottom) are shown. Each column represents a bird and columns are sorted in order of increasing tutor similarity from left to right. Gene expression is scaled such the highest and lowest expression across samples have the brightest shade of red or blue, respectively. (B) Expression of MAPK11 is replotted, here separated by virus group and then sorted by increasing tutor percentage similarity. (C) The FoxP2 binding sequence as annotated by the JASPAR database (top) and a potential binding site found in the MAPK11 ‘promoter’. (D) Amplification of genomic DNA (‘Genomic’) with primers for a region of the MAPK11 ‘promoter’ that contains a putative FoxP2 binding site enrich a fragment of predicted size (red arrowhead) in the pull-down lane (FoxP2) but not the control (IgG) lane. (E) MAPK11 and its 10 closest network neighbors, including green learning-related module members and hub gene ATF2, as defined by topological overlap.

Figure 6—source data 1. The sorted gene expression data as presented in panel 6A.
Columns are ordered from left to right by increasing tutor percentage similarity attained by that bird. Rows are sorted by the gene’s significance to learning.
elife-30649-fig6-data1.xlsx (1.9MB, xlsx)
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.30649.031

Figure 6.

Figure 6—figure supplement 1. MAPK11 PCR Product Sequencing.

Figure 6—figure supplement 1.

The MAPK11 NCBI RefSeq sequence (highlighted in grey) contains a potential FoxP2 binding motif (red). Genomic DNA was isolated and subjected to PCR with primers (highlighted in yellow) amplifying the region of interest. The product of each primer was sequenced showing our primers amplify a fragment containing the proposed FoxP2 binding motif.