We estimated the median and variance of each of the 47,294 probe types for each population, and analyzed the distribution of variance and median values of normalized values by Gene Ontology (GO) categories 26 after summarizing them in GO-slim categories 27. Specific GO-slim categories such as “chaperone regulatory activity” showed an excess of high variance of gene expression, while genes with extracellular function showed low levels of variation. “Chaperone regulatory activity” genes and “translational regulatory activity” genes had highest median expression levels across all populations. The latter category was mainly driven by very high levels of expression of ribosomal proteins.
