Fig. 3

The correlation matrix of quantitative variables. Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to measure the correlation between different quantitative variables (PFGE type, antibiotic resistance pattern, plaque size, host range, EOP value, latency period, and burst size). The diagonal shows distribution of each variable: on the top, the values of the correlations are displayed, while on the bottom, the bivariate scatters plots with a fitted line are shown