Re-analysis of publicly available microarray data reported by Covens et al. (A) Ratio of two Euclidean distances (averaged over 9 sample-pairs): distance between B-1 cell and memory B cell (MEM), over the distance between B-1 cell and plasmablast (PB). Six gene selection schemes are used. Red: genes are ranked by the (1-sided) plasmablast-over-memory B cell fold-changes; brown: (one-sided) plasmablast-over-B-1 cell fold-changes; blue: smaller P value from the 4-group (naive B cell, memory B cell, B-1 cell, plasmablast) ANOVA test; light blue: larger 12-sample variance; green: larger plasmablast expression level; and dark blue: random selection of genes. The x-axis is the number of genes in the gene set (in the log-scale). The dashed horizontal line separates the two situations: B-1 cells being closer to plasmablasts (above), and B-1 cells being closer to memory B cells (below). (B) Similar to (A) with Manhattan distance being used. (C) Difference of 2 Pearson correlation coefficient (cc) converted z values (averaged over 9 sample-pairs): z between B-1 cell and memory B cell, subtracts z between B-1 cell and plasmablast. The z is defined by the Fisher transformation: z = .5 log([1 + cc]/[1 − cc]). The dashed horizontal line separates the situation for B-1 cells being closer to memory B cells (above) and that for B-1 cells being closer to plasmablasts (below). (D) Similar to (C) with Spearman correlation coefficient (and the corresponding z value) being used. (E-F) Scatter plot of log-expression level with the top 100 genes selected by the one-sided plasmablast-over-B-1 cells fold changes. (E) a B-1 cell (GSM1048794) (x-axis) versus a plasmablast (GSM1048797) (y-axis) for the top 100 genes selected by one-sided plasmablast-over-B-1 cell fold-change; (F) a B-1 cell (GSM1048794) (x-axis) versus a memory B cell (GSM1048791) (y-axis) for the same set of 100 genes.