Fig. 1: Experimental design and the performance of VMs and MMs.

a Locations of the two family groups of wild and female skywalker hoolock gibbons (group NK in red and NK in blue) and the number of associated fecal samples per month from October 2017 to December 2018. China boundary was obtained from the National Catalog Service for Geographic Information. b Overview of the experimental methods and bioinformatic pipelines used for VMs and MMs. c Distribution of phage genome size colored by the two metagenomic approaches (VM: green, MM: purple). d Distribution of phage taxonomic families recovered by the two metagenomic approaches. Inset: Comparison of the phage genome completeness (left panel) and the proportion of prophages (right panel) between the two approaches. The prophage proportion for the three replicates of ten randomly amplified VM samples were averaged. e The number of phage genomes recovered by the two different metagenomic approaches across fecal samples of the six gibbons. In boxplots, boxes represent the interquartile range (IQR), and the lines inside show the median. The lower and upper whiskers correspond to the lowest and highest values within 1.5 times the IQR. Statistical significance is based on non-parametric Wilcoxon t-test (unpaired and two-sided), and the n number (i.e., the sample size used to derive statistics) are provided for each group. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.