Global differential gene expression between stages of human and murine terminal erythroid differentiation. Expression values of genes differentially expressed between differentiation stages are shown in heat map format. The red, white, and blue colors represent higher than average, close to average, and lower than average expression of a particular gene, respectively, as measured by row standardized Z-scores. The rows are organized by hierarchical clustering using agglomerative clustering with complete linkage and Euclidian distance metric. (A) Human. (B) Mouse. In human, there are varying patterns of coordinate gene expression. In contrast, in mouse, the majority of genes have a pattern of decreasing expression during terminal erythroid differentiation. The results from analyses in human (A) and mouse (B) were obtained in independent analyses. (C) Combined analyses. A combined data set of orthologous genes from each differentiation stage of terminal erythroid differentiation in human and mouse was created. Hierarchical clustering to identify groups of genes with similar and different patterns of gene expression between species was performed.