Sharing and Specificity of Co-expression Networks across 35 Human Tissues
Fig 4
Important principles of tissue-specificity.
a) Tissue-specific transcription factors (circled in blue) have higher expression levels (green) in tissues they are specific to, and those that change most dramatically in expression are most likely to be essential genes. b) Tissue-specific transcription factors connect to and upregulate genes with tissue-specific function (circled in red), which in turn connect to each other. c) Transcription factors lie at the centers of networks; genes with tissue-specific function and enriched modules lie at the network peripheries. d) Modules shared across tissues are more likely to be enriched for Gene Ontology functions, and tend to have functions common to all tissues like cell division.