Molecular Systems Biology 7 Article number: 497 doi:10.1038/msb.2011.28
Published online: 7 June 2011
Citation: Molecular Systems Biology 7:497
RNA sequencing reveals two major classes of gene expression levels in metazoan cells
Daniel Hebenstreit1, Miaoqing Fang2, Muxin Gu1, Varodom Charoensawan1, Alexander van Oudenaarden3 & Sarah A Teichmann1
Structural Studies Division, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK
Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, USA
Department of Physics and Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, USA
Correspondence to: Daniel Hebenstreit1 Structural Studies Division, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 0QH, UK. Tel.: +44 122 340 2479; Fax: +44 122 321 3556; Email: danielh@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk
Correspondence to: Sarah A Teichmann1 Structural Studies Division, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 0QH, UK. Tel.: +44 122 325 2947; Fax: +44 122 321 3556; Email: sat@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk
Received 1 March 2011; Accepted 19 April 2011; Published online 7 June 2011
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Abstract
The expression level of a gene is often used as a proxy for determining whether the protein or RNA product is functional in a cell or tissue. Therefore, it is of fundamental importance to understand the global distribution of gene expression levels, and to be able to interpret it mechanistically and functionally. Here we use RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) of mouse Th2 cells, coupled with a range of other techniques, to show that all genes can be separated, based on their expression abundance, into two distinct groups: one group comprised of lowly expressed and putatively non-functional mRNAs, and the other of highly expressed mRNAs with active chromatin marks at their promoters. These observations are confirmed in many other microarray and RNA-seq data sets of metazoan cell types.
Keywords: bimodal; ChIP-seq; expression levels; RNA-FISH; RNA-seq
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