Description of the data
The plant small RNA sequencing yielded on average 18 222 557 reads (min 11148864, max 63 508 829 and sd 3 944 297) per sample. VirusDetect assembled 512 908 contigs in total (min 39 nt, mean 63 nt, max 5408 nt and sd 45 nt). There were 5504 contigs (min 40 nt, mean 90 nt, max 1232 nt) with hits to known virus taxa (Gorbalenyai & Siddell 2021) with average sequence similarity of 82% (min 23%, max 100%). Our analyses are focused on the 25 identified plant-associated viruses.
Out of the 400 sampled host plants, four samples were discarded due to missing explanatory variable data. Thus, we had 396 sampled plants, resulting in 9 900 unique virus observations. The prevalence of the individual viruses varied from 0.5 to 36% in the whole data. Of the 396 plants, 29% were uninfected, 32% hosted a single infection, and 39% of the plants hosted multiple infections, of which 7% consisted of five or more viruses (Figure 2A).