Figure 2

Schematic figure explaining the workflow for testing the statistical significance of expression anti-correlation of miRNAs and mRNAs in the same MTBs. (a) An example MTB (submatrix in cells with red borders), corresponding random miRNA-mRNA pairs (cells with green borders) and other targets of the miRNAs that define the MTB (cells with blue borders). (b) The expression levels of the miRNAs and mRNAs from multiple cell lines were collected. The expression correlation between each miRNA-mRNA pair in the MTB was computed. Similar correlation values were also computed for the two background sets (not shown). (c) For each MTB and corresponding background sets, the computed correlation values were recorded. (d) These correlation values were compared against a threshold t (-0.1 for example), and the fraction of correlation values more negative than t was computed. The vector of these fractional values from the MTBs was then compared to the vectors from the two background sets by a statistical test.