Fig. 2

Pituitary transcriptome is increasingly sex-biased across postnatal development. Barplot showing the number of A intersecting sex-biased genes or B intersecting sex-biased miRNAs between each age. Horizontal bars on the bottom left side of each plot show the numbers of male- (blue) or female-biased (red) genes/miRNAs at each age (absolute FC > 1.5; FDR < 0.05). Different intersection combinations between sex-biased genes/miRNAs identified at each age are represented by the dotplot. The number of genes/miRNAs which intersect in the indicated combination of sex comparisons is shown by the vertical barplots (# overlapping sex-biased genes/miRNAs). Expression plots of example C pre-pubertal (PD12-22) sex-biased genes and genes with sex-by-age effect between PD12 and PD22, D peri-/post-pubertal sex-biased genes, and E sex-biased miRNAs. Log2-transformed normalized counts (log2(normCounts)) are plotted for each gene/miRNA. Expression changes are shown across ages (x-axis). Large, filled points represent median expression at each age and unfilled points represent each biological replicate. Blue: male samples; red: female samples. Black asterisks highlight ages at which the corresponding genes/miRNAs are detected as sex-biased and red asterisks highlight genes with significant sex-by-age effect between PD12 and PD22. Network representation of pathways enriched for F male-biased and G female-biased differentially expressed genes. Each node represents a pathway and nodes are connected based on similarity in genes found enriching for the connected pathways (Jaccard distance). Node size represents the number of differentially expressed genes enriching for the given pathway and nodes are colored based on the differential expression comparison in which the genes were identified. Pathways that share similar genes are circled (dashed lines) and labeled manually based on pathway functions. Specific pathways and their manual labels can be found in Additional file 6: Table S5