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Fig. 3 | BMC Biology

Fig. 3

From: Sperm competition risk drives plasticity in seminal fluid composition

Fig. 3

Summary of the proteomics data. a Consistency of measurements of normalised mean label-free abundances (log10 transformed), between treatment groups. The matrix plots show how well the seminal fluid proteomes of each treatment group correlate in pairwise comparisons. b Ranked mean log10 abundance curves for each of the four treatment group seminal vesicle proteomes, with those proteins found to be important for classifying samples according to the sperm competition risk treatment (from Random Forest modelling), labelled as black points with their accession number. c A heatmap of the mean abundance of proteins in the seminal vesicle proteomes across the four treatment groups. Un-transformed normalised abundances for those proteins present at significantly different levels between the mating groups (according to ANOVA in Progenesis QI; p < 0.05) were averaged, based on prior analyses of how well their proteomes correlate with one another between biological replicates, within each treatment group (data not shown). Mean abundances were then centred and scaled based on protein identity (row) and hierarchically clustered according to both treatment group (column) and protein (row) data. Euclidean distance measures and the “complete” linkage method for hierarchical clustering were used and the result plotted as a heatmap (using the R package ‘pheatmap’). Clear differences in the abundance of seminal vesicle proteins are apparent. Proteins found to be important for classifying samples according to the sperm competition risk treatment (from Random Forest modelling), are highlighted with bold accession numbers. Abbreviations of treatment groups are as follows: HSC high sperm competition, LSC low sperm competition, HMR high mating rate, LMR low mating rate

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