Figure 1

Density of skeletal muscle and of RMS genes associated sequences along human X chromosome. Gene density was calculated in chromosomal regions spanned by sliding windows, as the fraction of genomic sequence covered by gene-associated sequences, on the basis of 15,165 windows of 1 Mb with an overlap between adjacent windows of 10 Kb. As an example, details about gene density on the human X chromosome are shown. Gene density values were normalized to the total number of expressed genes and plotted together on the same base-pair scale axis. Chromosomal regions in which absolute difference between RMS and skeletal muscle gene density was over 0.6 were selected. On the X chromosome, one region resulted to harbour mostly genes expressed in RMS (p22.31-p22.22) and two regions resulted to contain genes expressed in fully differentiated muscle but silent in RMS (q21.2 and q21.33). Complete plots of gene densities along all human chromosomes are available as supplementary material [14].