Figure 3

Short-range co-expression regularities in B. subtilis. To identify the regularities which are common to most of the genome, regardless of the genes localisation, the autocorrelation vectors of all the genes were summed (blue curve). This global signal shows the averaged autocorrelation regularities as a function of inter-gene distance. The green zone shows the averaged autocorrelation when the genes positions on the genome were randomly assigned (mean of the random signal ± the root mean square deviation). The horizontal scale represents the distance between two genes (the difference of their ranks on the chromosome). Neighbouring genes on the chromosome show highly correlated variations of expression levels. The averaged autocorrelation of two contiguous genes is 0.4. The signal can be decomposed into two parts: (i) inter-gene distances between 1 and 5–6 genes are characterised by a high autocorrelation, which drops steeply; (ii) beyond 6 genes the autocorrelation shows a regular and slower decrease. The autocorrelation merges with the background noise at an inter-gene distance of about 100 genes (similar to 100 kb). The autocorrelation decrease may be seen as the resultant of a linear decrease and 14.5 ± 1 genes period oscillations (red curve).