Fig. 4: Volcano plot analysis of gene expression of M. jannaschii transcriptomes in the iron-sulfide chemical gardens.

Gene expression is compared to two sets of controls (experiments 5a–c, Supplementary Table 1). a, Significant overexpression of genes (n = 34, P < 0.05) in M. jannaschii transcriptomes from 80 °C iron-sulfide chemical gardens (red, experiment 5a) relative to the MMC medium (beige, experiment 5c) (P = 0.05, one-sided t-test). b, Significant overexpression of genes (n = 46, P < 0.05) in M. jannaschii transcriptomes from 80 °C iron-sulfide chemical gardens (red, experiment 5a) relative to sterile water negative controls (blue, experiment 5b) (P = 0.05, one-sided t-test). The vertical line separates expressed genes that either increased or decreased in rank in the chemical gardens, the dotted horizontal line represents the P value cutoff for determining statistical significance. Overexpressed genes in the chemical gardens that are part of the methanogenic acetyl-CoA pathway are labelled. The full spellings of the gene acronyms of the acetyl-CoA pathway are provided in Supplementary Tables 1 and 2. Note that the genes of the methanogenic acetyl-CoA pathway were only overexpressed in the iron-sulfide chemical gardens, and were overexpressed relative to the MMC medium and sterile water negative controls.