Figure 7.

Noise estimates for the data of Nagalakshmi et al. [1]. The data allow assessment of technical variability (between library preparations from aliquots of the same yeast culture) and biological variability (between two independently grown cultures). The blue curves depict the squared coefficient of variation at the common scale, w_ρ(q)/q² (see Equation (9)) for technical replicates, the red curves for biological replicates (solid lines, dT data set, dashed lines, RH data set). The data density is shown by the histogram in the top panel. The purple area marks the range of the shot noise for the range of size factors in the data set. One can see that the noise between technical replicates follows closely the shot noise limit, while the noise between biological replicates exceeds shot noise already for low count values.