Fig. 1
mTECs express higher number of genes compare to other tissues. a Mature mTECs expressed higher number of genes than all the tissues and cell types examined, including the brain and testes. Number of protein-coding genes expressed (at least 0.01 reads/nt) in eight different tissue types (brain, testes, colon, kidney, liver, lung, skeletal muscle (skm), and spleen), two epithelial cell types: cortical thymic epithelial cells (cTECs) and skin epithelial cells (skinEC), and three types of mTECs (low MHC-II [mTEClo], high MHC-II [mTEChi], and Aire-deficient [AireKO]) on the basis of 10–60 million randomly selected aligned RNA-seq reads for each sample. Gray lines denote the percentage of genes out of 21,111 accounted in this analysis. b Distribution of gene expression levels of immature mTECs exhibit a high ratio of lowly expressed genes and is different from other tissues and cell types examined. Kernel density estimates of normalized read counts distributions of 50 million randomly selected aligned reads from the same RNA-seq data within protein-coding genes. Vertical line denotes the expression detection threshold used in Fig. 1a (0.01 reads/nt)