Relationships of environmental variables to mucus transcriptomic profiles
A linear mixed model was used to quantify the percent variance in transcriptome-wide gene expression that could be explained by water quality variables. The variables included in the model explained a median of 68.1% across all genes in the transcriptome-wide count matrix, leaving a median residual of 31.9% variance unexplained (Figure 7). Conductivity, chlorophyll a, alkalinity, and dissolved oxygen explained the greatest proportion of variance within the transcriptome (Figure 3).