Figure 7: Sequence conservation and abundance are correlated.
(a) Conserved families make the majority of miRNAs. Stacked bars represent the sum of abundances of conserved (dark blue) and non-conserved (light blue) families across all analysed species. Abundances are expressed as the percentage of total miRNA abundances for each species. (b) Sequence abundance increases as its conservation across plant species increases. Each data point represents the abundance of a miRNA sequence present in the corresponding number of species. Box plots indicate the median (line), 25th and 75th percentiles (boxes), and 10th and 90th percentiles (whiskers) of sequence abundances. Dots represent outliers. Abundance is expressed as the base 10 logarithm of RP103M. The number of sequences per number of species was the following: 1: 60,733; 2: 38,385; 3: 19,453; 4: 13,653; 5: 10,701; 6: 8,917; 7: 7,533; 8: 6,897; 9: 5,824; 10: 4,901; 11: 4,401; 12: 4,057; 13: 3,992; 14: 3,781; 15: 3,841; 16: 3,425; 17: 3,180; 18: 3,241; 19: 2,680; 20: 2,801; 21: 2,458; 22: 2,135; 23: 2,646; 24: 2,401; 25: 2,476; 26: 2,445; 27: 1,783; 28: 2,017; 29: 1,944; 30: 1,771; 31: 3,256; 32: 993; 33: 793; 34: 443.
