Symbiotic bacterial communities of zooplankters from Lake Biwa, Japan

In aquatic ecosystem, zooplankton and bacteria have been well studied in each of the separate units in the system, but not well studied as symbiotic relationship between these two components until recently. The related studies gradually increased, but the information of the symbiotic relationship is restricted to cultured animals. The host associated bacterial community in wild population are limited yet. In this study, we investigated symbiotic bacterial community structure associated with the bodies and feces of three dominant zooplankton taxa colonizing in Lake Biwa, using meta-barcoding analysis targeting the prokaryote-specific V4 region of 16S rDNA.