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Figure 5 | BMC Systems Biology

Figure 5

From: Functional redundancy of transcription factors explains why most binding targets of a transcription factor are not affected when the transcription factor is knocked out

Figure 5

NFR, chromatin remodelling TFs and transcriptional plasticity are associated with the overlap percentage. (a) By using the one-sided two-sample proportion test [28], we find that genes containing an nucleosome free region (NFR) show significantly (p-value << 0.001) lower overlap percentage compared with genes lacking an NFR, suggesting that containing an NFR immediately upstream of the TSS is associated with a gene being insensitive to the knockout of its promoter-binding TFs. The red line indicates the overlap percentage (4%) for all 4065 genes under study. (b) TFs involved in chromatin remodelling show significantly (using the one-sided two-sample proportion test) higher overlap percentage compared with the rest of the 173 TFs under study. This result further supports our finding that genes lacking an NFR show significantly higher overlap percentage. (c) Low transcriptional plasticity is associated with a gene being insensitive to the knockout of its promoter-binding TFs. The set of genes with low/high transcriptional plasticity is defined as those genes whose transcriptional plasticity are among the bottom/top X% of the 4065 genes under study. By using the one-sided two-sample proportion test, we find that genes with low transcriptional plasticity show significantly (p-value << 0.001) lower overlap percentage than do genes with high transcriptional plasticity, suggesting that low transcriptional plasticity is associated with a gene being insensitive to the knockout of its promoter-binding TFs. Note that our result is robust against different choices (10, 20, 30, 40 or 50) of X being used.

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