The pelagic zone of Lake Baikal is an ecological niche where phytoplankton bloom causes increasing microbial abundance in spring which plays a key role in carbon turnover in the freshwater lake. Co-occurrence patterns revealed among different microbes can be applied to predict interactions between the microbes and environmental conditions in the ecosystem. We used 454 pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA and 18S rRNA genes to study bacterial and microbial eukaryotic communities and their co-occurrence patterns at the pelagic zone of Lake Baikal during a spring phytoplankton bloom. We found that microbes within one domain mostly correlated positively with each other and are highly interconnected. The highly connected taxa in co-occurrence networks were operational taxonomic units (OTUs) of Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Alphaproteobacteria, and autotrophic and unclassified Eukaryota which might be analogous to microbial keystone taxa. Constrained correspondence analysis revealed the relationships of bacterial and microbial eukaryotic communities with geographical location.

The composition of bacterial communities in Lake Baikal in different hydrological periods and at different depths (down to 1515 m) has been analyzed using pyrosequencing of the 16S rRNA gene V3 variable region. Most of the resulting 34 562 reads of the Bacteria domain have clustered into 1693 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) classified with the phyla Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Chloroflexi, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, Acidobacteria and Cyanobacteria. It has been found that their composition at the family level and relative contributions to bacterial communities distributed over the water column vary depending on hydrological period. The number of OTUs and the parameters of taxonomic richness (ACE, Chao1 indices) and diversity (Shannon and inverse Simpson index) reach the highest values in water layers. The composition of bacterial communities in these layers remains relatively constant, whereas that in surface layers differs between hydrological seasons. The dynamics of physicochemical conditions over the water column and their relative constancy in deep layers are decisive factors in shaping the pattern of bacterial communities in Lake Baikal.

Production of axenic cultures of diatoms is a highly relevant task, as these widespread organisms are objects of research in different fields of biology, from ecology to whole-genome studies, and promising as producers of various organic molecules, including biologically active substances. However, culturing of diatoms isolated from natural communities is accompanied by the development of associated microorganisms. We propose a procedure for establishing an axenic culture of the freshwater diatom Synedra asus subsp. radians (Kütz.) Skabitsch. from Lake Baikal. Such a culture has been produced and maintained by subculturing in our laboratory. The procedure involves filtration (to remove free bacteria), detergent treatment (to remove microorganisms associated with diatom frustules), selection of effective antibiotics and their concentrations nontoxic for diatoms (by the disk diffusion method), cell treatment with the selected antibiotic (ciprofloxacin), repeated filtration, and monoclonal culturing of diatom cells. Axenity of the culture was verified microscopically (after DAPI staining) and by molecular biological methods.