Figure 2

Mean-variance relationship. Here we show the sample variance across lanes in the liver sample from the Marioni et al[6] data plotted as a function of the mean for each gene (a). Next we have the same data where the tag counts for each gene are divided by the length of the gene (b). The red line fits a linear relationship between the mean and variance for the one third of shortest genes while the blue line is the linear fit to the longest genes. In plot a the fits are very close to the line of equality between mean and variance (black line) which is what would be expected from a Poisson process. In plot b the short genes have higher variance for a given expression level than long genes.