In the distantly related Schizosaccharomyces pombe, we observe the same phenomenon of modular essentiality, suggesting that it may be a general feature of eukaryotes.
Of these 4 modules, all 4 were shown to have a strong relationship of k.in with essentiality in the same modules.
These results are robust with respect to experimental conditions since the three separate datasets all have the same functional relationship between connectivity and gene essentiality.
We obtained very similar results for iNJ661 m, suggesting that iNJ661m had the same ability to predict in vitro gene essentiality.
Previous studies have found that gene duplicability is positively correlated with gene dosage [ 20] and gene complexity [ 21], although the correlation with functional essentiality is not always the same in yeasts and mammals [ 22- 25].
Specifically, we observed that the nature of this relationship differed for E. coli and S. cerevisiae, with small protein size being indicative of essentiality in E. coli and the same being true of large proteins in S. cerevisiae.
It is important to note here, that while high expression is not a necessary condition for the gene to be termed essential, consistent expression across biological samples of the same kind is required for a gene to be considered for essentiality.
Other enzyme pairs that exhibited synthetic essentiality in iNJ661v were those who catalyzed the same reaction, i.e., each enzyme by itself was not essential, but if they were both deleted at the same time, the reaction could not proceed and the organism would stop growing.
Attribute 7 is based on the hypothesis that if two proteins are in the same protein complex or pathway, they are likely to share the essentiality in the cell because they should perform the same function together [36].
A similar pattern is observed during ECO analysis; however, compared with the SCE genome (Table 2A), the same features (e.g., NS) often show distinct effects on gene essentiality in the SRM (Table 2B).
