Figure 4
Quantitative analysis of synthetic phenotypes following the simultaneous targeting of both genes of a duplicate pair. For duplicate gene pairs that yielded reproducible synthetic effects, phenotypes produced by combinatorial RNA interference (RNAi) were quantitated. For each gene pair, brood size and embryonic survival following co-targeting of both duplicates (Observed Gene1 + 2) were compared with that following the targeting of each single gene alone (Gene1 or Gene2) and with the calculated product of the single gene brood sizes and embryonic survival measurements (Expected Gene1 + 2). Values plotted represent the percentage of average wild-type brood size and embryonic survival rates, respectively, and are the arithmetic mean of two independent experiments performed in the RNAi-hypersensitive strain rrf-3 [19]. ***p < 1.0 × 10-02, *p < 5.0 × 10-02, by Student's t-test. Note that combinatorial RNAi against the gene pair ptr-2 + ptr-10 resulted in a significantly increased number (p = 7.4 × 10-09, by Student's t-test) of first-generation larval growth arrested worms, rather than a brood size defect, hence these data are not shown.