Fig. 3: Abundance and expression dynamics of virus‒host relationships.

a Transcriptomic expression of viruses infecting different host genera. Boxplots show the expression level of viruses linked to three representative Cyanobacteriota genera at early, middle, and late stages of cyanobacterial blooms. b Changes in virus–host abundance ratios (VHRs) for different genera across 16 samples. The significance of p value is marked by asterisks (***p < 0.001; **p < 0.01; ns: p > 0.05).