Figure 4

The importance of the core cycling genes. (a) Percentage of essential genes in different sets of budding yeast genes [29]. Although 18% of budding yeast genes are essential, only 15% of cycling genes are essential. Our analysis resolves this apparent contradiction by showing that the conserved cycling genes lists contain a much higher percentage of essential genes (35% and 46% for CCC3 and CCC4). Sequence alone cannot account for this high percentage (27%), indicating the importance of the combined analysis. (b) Similar analysis for the human lists using data from RNA interference knockdown experiments [30].