Fig. 3: MGE detection tools reveal a diverse set of mobile elements in compost communities.

a Various tools were used to predict MGEs including phages, plasmids, IS-elements, ICEs, and integrons in xenotypic sequences. On the x-axis are 714/1756 candidate MGE contigs with at least one MGE prediction. MGE tools are depicted on the y-axis. Coloured bars indicate that the contig was predicted by the corresponding tool. b A Venn diagram shows substantial overlap between MGEs, especially phages and plasmids. This may indicate interactions or hybridisation of phages and plasmids, but could also be the result of erroneous assignment by one of the tools. c The number of MGE annotations derived from xenotypic sequences is compared with four controls. Controls consist of contigs with similar lengths to the xenotypic contigs, but are sampled from the whole compost community metagenome. A modified T-test (Crawford-Howell [110]) was used to infer whether phages, plasmids, IS-elements, ICEs, or Integrons were over- or under-represented among xenotypic sequences (* = p value < 0.05, ** = p value < 0.01, *** = p value < 0.001). See precise p-values, including those corrected for multiple testing using a Bonferroni adjustment, in Supplementary Table 1, sheet 3.