Fig. 3
From: Stability in gene expression and body-plan development leads to evolutionary conservation
Gene expression with less variation in ancestral generation tended to be conserved within descendant generation In the scatter plots, the x-axis shows variation in gene expression levels in the F0 generation, reflecting developmental stability: higher scores reflect lower stability. The y-axis shows variations, or diversity of gene expression levels in F3 generation: higher scores reflect greater diversity. Negative values for the gene expression variations in F0 and F3 are due to corrections for technical errors and mean expression levels. The results ae shown for the four developmental stages. For the F0 generation, the numbers of sibling pairs analyzed were 23 for stage 15, 24 for stage 23.5, 25 for stage 28, and 13 for hatching (22); for the F3 generation, the numbers of embryonic pairs used were 10 for stage 15 (the number of embryos = 5), 15 for stage 23.5 (n = 6), 15 for stage 28 (n = 6), and 15 for hatching (n = 6). Spearman’s correlation coefficients and the number of genes used are shown in each plot (stage 15, rho = 0.41, P = 6.6×10−33; stage 23.5, rho = 0.41, P = 1.1×10−40; stage 28, rho = 0.47, P = 6.4×10−56; hatching, rho = 0.38, P = 2.0×10−48). The P values are derived from the test of no correlation