Fig. 6

Enhanced exometabolite diversity in large pore spaces. Procrustes analysis revealing the significant correlation between microbial communities and exometabolite profiles (a). The Shannon diversity of the exometabolites in different pore spaces (b). Enrichment analysis of exometabolomic data with respect to fresh ISEM (c). The bubble size corresponds to the pathway enrichment ratio for differentially abundant metabolites across various pore spaces. Asterisks denote statistically significant differences based on the hypergeometric test (***p ≤ 0.001, **p ≤ 0.01, *p ≤ 0.05, n = 7 independent biological replicates per pore size)