Fig. 4.

Differences between coated PM and PM where coating was not considered (uncoated). (A) Uncoated PM (green) are located mainly at the center of the empirical network (light blue circle), whereas the coated PM (orange) are located mainly at the periphery of the network. Size of nodes is proportional to their degree. (B) Boxplots showing the distributions of the number of DOM types studied with uncoated and coated PM (i.e., the degrees of the PM nodes). (C) Boxplots showing the number of experiments performed (i.e., sum of link weights of the PM nodes) with uncoated and coated PM (with citrate- and PVP-coated nanosilver and citrate-coated nanogold omitted). The borders of the boxplots are the 25th and the 75th percentiles. P values are for the two-sample, nonparametric Mann–Whitney U test (alternative hypotheses: “uncoated PMs are studied with more DOM types than coated PMs” and “uncoated PMs are studied in more experiments than coated PMs”).