Figure 1

Sequence conservation among lncRNAs. (a) Conservation across a generic lncRNA locus, based on 877 mouse multi-exon lncRNAs. We sampled 200 evenly spaced bases across each region listed, with regions containing fewer than 200 bases sampled entirely. The graph shows the average vertebrate phastCons score at each genomic position across all multi-exon lncRNA loci. Note phastCons score peaks within the putative promoter region (200 bp upstream) and near donor and acceptor splice sites (analysis inspired by Figure 25a in [31]). (b) Overlap between vertebrate phastCons-predicted conserved elements and mouse lncRNA exons. Of 2,055 lncRNAs with signatures of purifying selection initially identified in mouse [18], 1,095 contain exons that overlap phastCons-predicted vertebrate conserved elements (log-odds score range 1 to 1,000) [30]. Depicted is a histogram showing the percentage of each lncRNA transcript that overlaps a phastCons-predicted vertebrate conserved element. The relative positions of three selected lncRNAs (AK082072, AK043754, and AK082467 with overlaps of 36.7, 44.8, and 51.7%, respectively) are shown.