Figure 6
Observed data comparing two phenotypically identical cells diverge markedly from modeling predictions of such a comparison. Simulations of expression data comparing two identical cells were performed for the most likely transcript abundance distributions indicated by the half-vs-half (split-cell) simulations (curves with data points shown), and compared to actual data from pairwise comparisons of single neural stem cells (thin green curves). The distributions for the real cells are all considerably wider than for the model cells, showing real variation of gene expression that cannot be explained by a combination of technical noise and the sampling effect. X-axis: log intensity ratio (data divided into 0.10 log unit bins); y-axis: proportion of genes in each bin.