Fig. 4

Background noise cutoff. a The colonies were transferred onto the selection plate and further quantified on different culturing day, including day 0, b day 1, c day 4, and d day 7. During (a) the pinning process, the transferred cell amount of each yeast colony would not be exactly the same. The numbers above the colonies represent the colony size. In this case, all colony sizes are smaller than 20, and thus 20 is used as the cutoff for background noise. If a colony is not larger than cutoff value 20, the signal from this colony would be regarded as the signal from background noise. For example, the colony signal with size 7 on a day 0 would be interpreted as the background noise as well as on b day 1 (size 11), and c day 4 (size 15). d On day 7, the colony signal increased to 31, larger than the cutoff value 20 and would no longer be regarded as the background noise