Fig. 8

Co-occurrence network among the MAGs recovered from the studied groundwater wells. The proportionality network was constructed using normalized average coverages of the MAGs enriched (by fivefold coverage difference) in 0.2 µm filter fractions as compared to 0.1 µm filter fractions to retain Patescibacteria possibly attached to other microbial hosts. The filled oval regions highlight the direct one-to-one associations of Patescibacteria MAGs paired with Omnitrophota MAGs. The zoomed-in cluster shows direct associations of Patescibcteria MAGs (filled red circles) with multiple Nitrospirota (filled blue circles) and Bacteroidota (filled cyan circles) MAGs highlighted with black outlines and arrows, while grey outlines and arrows indicate indirect associations. For construction of the proportionality network, ⍴ (rho) value cut-off of 0.95 was used