Fig. 7

Expression analyses in three N. vectensis tissues. a Principal components plot indicating variation within and among tissue types. PC1 describes 57 % of the variation among tissues and PC2 describes 34 % in the top 1000 expressed transcripts. b Heatmap indicating gene expression (variance stabilized counts) of the top 1000 expressed transcripts. Transcripts are clustered using the Ward’s D method (see Additional file 9); warmer colors indicate higher expression. Dotted lines indicate clusters with ubiquitous expression across tissues, the arrow indicates a cluster with high expression in nematosomes only, and arrowheads indicate clusters with high expression in only mesenteries or tentacles. c Nineteen out of twenty transcripts identified by RNA-Seq as being significantly upregulated in nematosomes relative to both other tissues were also found to have significantly lower expression in the mesenteries and tentacles, relative to nematosomes, using qPCR. Expression of Nv2643 in the tentacles (indicated by *) is not significantly different from 0. Dotted lines indicate 2(log₂)-fold change in expression between nematosomes and the other tissues. Mean ± SD