Fig. 4

Analysis of the ME1 co-expression module. A) PCA of the blood expression patterns in the wild M. myotis samples Principal component analysis (PCA) using all the coding genes and lncRNAs characterised in the ME1 module. Color gradient represents the global expression of the ME1 module (eigengene calculated by WGCNA); B) Spearman’s correlation analysis between the ME1 global expression (eigengene) and age of the bat in the M. myotis population. Only the samples with known ages and the samples over 7 years old were selected for this analysis. Samples over 7 years old (e.g. 7+) were treated as 7 years old when calculating Spearman’s correlation. C) Spearman correlations between ME1 and the other 11 modules’ global expressions. D) Top 10 Coding genes with the highest number of co-expressed lncRNAs in ME1; E) Scatter plot showing the relationship between the number of co-expressed coding genes and expression levels of each lncRNA in ME1. F) Genomic visualisation of predicted lncRNA: BatLnc1. The top session shows the genomic location of BatLnc1 visualised using the genome browser; the below session shows the expression level and splicing variants of BatLnc1 using an individual bat sample (MMY612) as an example, PhastCon scores indicate the conservation level of each nucleotide of BatLnc1. G) Expression heatmap of top 20 coding genes that were co-expressed with BatLnc1 across 100 M. myotis blood samples. The expression counts were TMM-normalised, and further converted to z-scores. The metadata of these samples, such as age, site, year-of-capture, were color-coded (left). For age, blue dots indicate the samples with known age, while the red dots indicate a minum of “+” age (right). Adjacency scores between BatLnc1 and other genes are displayed (top)