Fig. 4

Taxonomic distribution of plasmid-associated hosts in the IGCJ dataset. a Abundance and prevalence of plasmid-associated hosts at the phylum level in the IGCJ dataset. The left dot plot shows the abundance (y-axis) and the prevalence (x-axis) of each plasmid. Putative hosts are assigned to plasmids and are grouped into four major taxa, and unknown and other taxa are coloured differently. The right box plot shows the abundance distributions of the phylum of plasmid hosts depicted by the inter-quartile range (IQR) and median. The whiskers show the lowest and highest values within 1.5 times the IQR. The letters (a, b, c, and d) above the boxes indicate statistically significant (P < 0.01) differences between phyla with different letters. b Phylum-level compositions of host taxa from the whole metagenome data and plasmids in the five countries. The average abundance of the phyla, depicted by different colours, in the five countries is shown