The number of eGenes ranged from 919 in heart to 2244 in thyroid, with a total of 6486 unique eGenes across the nine tissues (Fig. 2A). Rerunning the analysis on successively downsampled donor subsets from each tissue showed an approximately linear relationship between eGenes and sample size (slope of ~21 eGenes per sample; Fig. 2A). Interestingly, thyroid and nerve share a steeper slope with ~29 significant eGenes per sample, whereas muscle and blood share a shallower trajectory with ~15 eGenes per sample, which may reflect the lower transcript complexity observed for these two tissues (17). The number of eGenes identified showed no signs of plateauing at current sample sizes in any of the tissues.
