Fig. 2. DNA viral contigs with differential transcription in wet and dry soil treatments.

a Transcript abundance profiling of the identified DNA viral contigs. The mean transcript abundance of each DNA viral contig detected in all soils was plotted along the y axis in the sub-panel on the left. The normalized transcript abundances of each DNA viral contig were compared across treatments (wet and dry soils) and transformed into log₂ fold change (wet relative to dry). The viral contigs with significantly differential transcript counts across treatments (p < 0.05) are highlighted in red in the sub-panel on the left. A zoomed-in panel on the right shows the viral contigs with lower transcript counts. b Four DNA viral contigs that were detected with differential transcript abundances in wet (blue) and dry (red) soils are shown. c Quality-filtered metatranscriptomic read coverage for the VC_1 sequence (total length of 8915 bp); the sequence with the highest number of transcripts mapped in (a). The solid line represents the mean read coverage per position detected in all replicates for each treatment (red = dry soil; blue = wet soil). The gray shading shows the range of read coverage distribution per position (0.05–0.95 quantile).