Stochastic principles governing alternative splicing of RNA
Fig 2
The frequency distribution of transcript isoforms.
(A) Schematic diagram of alternative splicing and calculation of transcript isoform frequencies. Colored regions represent exons. Gray regions represent introns and intergenic sequences. For simplification, the expression values of isoforms are taken as integers. (B) The boxplot distribution of transcript isoform frequency f(k, M) with fixed k and increasing M. k is the rank of transcript isoform. M is the number of transcript isoforms of genes. Boxplot represents frequency distribution calculated from our RNA-seq data by Cufflinks based on merged gene datasets. Blue curve represents median values calculated from the approximation formula (4). Red curve represents median values from simulation of Weibull distribution W(0.39). (C) The distribution of the Euclidian distance relative to different a for all mf(k,M) in Fig 2B between experimental data and simulated data from Weibull distribution. The distance reaches the minimum when a = 0.39.