Interactions between algae and bacteria represent an important inter-organism association in aquatic environments, which often have cascading bottom-up influences on ecosystem-scale processes. Despite the increasing recognition of linkages between bacterioplankton and dynamics of dinoflagellate blooms in the field, knowledge about the forms and functions of dinoflagellate-bacteria associations remains elusive, mainly due to the ephemeral and variable conditions in the field. In this study, we characterized the bacterial community associated with laboratory cultures of 144 harmful algal strains, including 130 dinoflagellates (covering all major taxonomic orders of dinoflagellates) and 14 non-dinoflagellates, via high-throughput sequencing for 16S rRNA gene amplicons. A total of 4577 features belonging to bacteria kingdom comprising of 24 phyla, 55 classes, 134 orders, 273 families, 716 genera, and 1104 species were recovered from the algal culture collection, and 3 phyla (Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, and Firmicutes) were universally present in all the culture samples. Bacterial communities in dinoflagellates cultures exhibited remarkable conservation across different algal strains, which were dominated by a relatively small number of taxa, most notably the γ-proteobacteria Methylophaga, Marinobacter and Alteromonas. Although the bacterial community composition between dinoflagellates and non-dinoflagellate groups did not show significant difference in general, dinoflagellates harbored a large number of unique features (up to 3811) with relatively low individual abundance and enriched in the potential methylotrophs Methylophaga. While the bacterial assemblages associated with thecate and athecate dinoflagellates displayed no general difference in species composition and functional groups, athecate dinoflagellates appeared to accommodate more aerobic cellulolytic members of Actinobacteria, implying a more possible reliance on cellulose utilization as energy source. The extensive co-occurrence discovered here implied that the relationships between these algal species and the bacterial consortia could be viewed as either bilaterally beneficial (i.e., mutualism) or unilaterally beneficial at least to one party but virtually harmless to the other party (i.e., commensalism), whereas both scenarios support a long-term and stable co-existence rather than an exclusion of one or the other. Our results demonstrated that dinoflagellates-associated bacterial communities were similar in composition, with enrichment of potential uncultured methylotrophs to one-carbon compounds. This work enriches the knowledge about the fundamental functions of bacteria consortia associated with the phycospheres of dinoflagellates and other HABs-forming microalgae.
Keywords: Actinobacteria; algae-associated bacterial community; dinoflagellate; harmful algae; methylotrophs.