Figure 1

Reconstruction of a functional P. falciparum transcriptional network. (A) Gene network. Genes (nodes) are connected by edges indicating functional interactions, as defined by normalized, meta-analyzed co-expression across nine in vivo and in vitro datasets. For visualization, the highest 0.1st percentile of normalized co-expressions (edges) is shown, and singleton genes that would result from this filter are omitted. Genes with gametocyte, host cell remodeling or host cell invasion annotations (Additional file 1) are marked in blue, yellow and turquoise, respectively. Note that immature and mature gametocytes form separate sub-networks. (B) Network of gene clusters. Clusters (functional modules) of tightly linked genes were defined in the gene network (see Methods) and used as a convenient summarization for analysis throughout this work. Shown is an overview of how these clusters relate to each other, as defined by averaging all edges between genes spanning each cluster pair, using the same color-coding as in (A). Circle sizes indicate the relative number of genes per cluster.