Figure 2.

Combinatorial RNA interference (RNAi) can recapitulate known synthetic lethal interactions. To test whether combinatorial RNAi could recapitulate seven synthetic lethal interactions that were identified from literature (see Table 2 for references), brood size and embryonic survival measurements following co-targeting of both genes of a synthetic lethal pair (Observed Gene1 + 2) were compared with that following the targeting of each single gene alone (Gene1 or Gene2) and with the calculated product of the single gene brood sizes and embryonic survival measurements (Expected Gene1 + 2); this product represents the predicted outcome if the genetic interaction is purely additive. Values plotted represent the percentage of average wild-type brood size and embryonic survival rates, and are the arithmetic mean of two independent experiments performed in the RNAi-hypersensitive strain rrf-3 [19]. ***p < 1.0 × 10^-02; *p < 5.0 × 10^-02, by Student's t-test.