A simple metric of promoter architecture robustly predicts expression breadth of human genes suggesting that most transcription factors are positive regulators

Table 4 Correlations and partial correlations

		BoE*	BoE-*partial*	Average*	Averagepartial	Average -conditioned*	Average conditionedpartial
Parameters	GC	0.33	−0.03	0.33	0.00	−0.07	0.04
	GC_big	−0.02	−0.04	−0.00	−0.01	0.01	−0.02
	GC3	−0.08	−0.05	−0.06	0.05	0.08	0.10
	CpG	0.42	0.18	0.42	−0.03	−0.12	−0.16
	TfbsNo.	0.48	0.40	0.48	−0.06	−0.13	−0.29
	Methyl	−0.11	−0.04	−0.09	0.00	0.04	0.03
	DNASE1	0.19	0.06	0.20	−0.02	−0.06	−0.07
	BoE	---	---	0.94	0.91	0.45	0.63
	Avg**	0.94	0.91	---	---	0.55	---**
	Avg_cond**	0.45	0.63	0.55	---**	---	---

NOTE: Partial correlations (signified by the –partial suffix) are Spearman correlations between the column variable with each raw variable, i.e. parameter or explanatory variable, controlling simultaneously for all other parameters.
The parameters include four measures of GC-content: GC-content in a 1 kb proximal promoter (GC), GC-content in a 20 kbps window around the promoter (GC_big), GC-content in a third codon position (GC3), frequency of CpG sites (CpG). TfbsNo. describes the number of transcription factor binding sites in the promoter. Methyl is a measure of methylation while DNASE1 is the signature of open-chromatin.
* Straight correlations.
** When calculating partial correlations for each measure of average expression (i.e. average expression and average-conditioned-on-breadth), we omitted the other measure of average expression.

ISSN: 1474-760X