Fig. 3

Zodiac plot representing the trade-off between power and cost. The zodiac plot shows the statistical power (at 5% significance level) to call a single gene DE versus the relative total cost of data generation for three different cost-saving strategies compared to a reference design. The power is calculated for a gene with relative abundance ρ=10⁻⁷ in one group, LFC (‘effect size’) θ∈{0.5,1}, and over-dispersion (‘variability’) ϕ∈{0.5,2}. The reference design consists of 120 samples (n₁=n₂=60) with average library size of 20M per sample and no pooling. Strategy A is pooling with pool size q∈{2,3,4,6} and average library size of 20M per pool. Strategy B is similar to the reference, except the number of samples is reduced to n∈{60,40,30,20}. Strategy C is similar to the reference, except the sequencing depth is reduced to L∈{10M,5M,1M,0.5M}. The relative cost is calculated as the total cost of a particular strategy divided by that of the reference design