Fig. 5

Gene connectivity is not preserved across tissues. The top 50 connected genes from the most robust modules in PAG and cortex were selected to compare how connectivity across the tissues was preserved. Connectivity was determined by the “kWithin” parameter in WGCNA, measuring the intra-modular connections weighted by topological similarities. Not all of these genes were commonly expressed in both tissues so only 43 genes from the top PAG module (midnight blue) and 49 genes from the top cortex module (red) could be compared. The gene colour represents the module they belong to and the colour intensity of gene connections indicates topological overlap (TO), also represented as “edge weight”, which is normalized between 0 and 1 for cross module comparison. The connections amongst genes for the midnight blue PAG module were not well conserved in the cortex (a-b). The connections between genes for the red cortex module were also poorly conserved in the PAG (d-e). The low preservation was also clearly illustrated when comparing the overall TO differences between the tissues for the PAG midnight blue module (c) or the red cortex module (f)