Figure 2

(A) The relative composition of miRNAs detected in infected and uninfected horse blood samples. Approximately 73% of all miRNA reads across the six samples corresponded to miR-486-5p, which is highly expressed in erythrocytes. miRNAS representing between 0.3–5% of total reads are drawn as a stacked bar to the right of the pie. The remaining miRNAs (“others <0.3%”) each took up less than 0.3% of the total read pool, corresponding to a cutoff point of about 125,000 actual reads. (B) Inter-sample variance (blue line) decreases with increasing depth of sequencing (red line). MiRNAs with <10 counts across the six samples had on average very high inter-sample variance.