Fig. 6

GC content variation in potential promoter regions based on the MC58 genome sequence. a Scatter plot of the GC content variation averaged over a 5-bp sliding window within 100 bp upstream regions for genes highly expressed in MC58 (red and yellow lines) or α522 (light and dark blue lines) in human blood. The black line gives the GC content of the respective upstream regions for genes not differently expressed. Regulatory regions are indicated at the top of the panel based on the average length of 5’-untranslated regions in N. gonorrhoeae [75]. The insert gives the number of genes in each gene set. b Box-and-whiskers plot depicting differences in the mean GC content of the putative discriminator (left) and Hfq-binding regions (right) between genes highly expressed in MC58 (red) or α522 (blue) in human blood as depicted in panel (a). The line within each box gives the median and the upper and lower margins the upper and the lower quartile, respectively. The whiskers denote the highest and the lowest values, respectively, and the open circles outliers. *: p < 0.05, **: p < 0.01 (Wilcoxon test)