Elucidation of the bacterial communities associated with the harmful microalgae Alexandrium tamarense and Cochlodinium polykrikoides using nanopore sequencing

Interactions between microalgae and bacteria are often obligatory for harmful algal blooms (HABs). Here, we investigated the specific bacterial communities associated with Alexandrium tamarense and Cochlodinium polykrikoides, which cause ecological and economic damage during their blooms. To this end, the bacterial metagenome was selectively isolated from the two dinoflagellates and subsequently used for 16S rRNA analysis via the Nanopore MinION and Illumina sequencing platforms. Although the full-length 16S rRNA reads from the MinION platform showed high correlation in higher taxonomic ranks to the partial-length 16S rRNA reads from the Illumina platform, there was less correlation at the genus and species levels. MinION reads that are similar in the V3-V4 hypervariable regions with Illumina reads are classified to different taxonomies due to the extra information encoded in the full-length 16S rRNA reads. This indicates that bias arising from the short length Illumina reads can be supplemented by MinION reads. Furthermore, integrated analysis of the Illumina and MinION data showed that A. tamarense was predominantly enriched in the Roseobacter clade and C. polykrikoides was enriched in Gammaproteobacteria and Alphaproteobacteria. These results suggest that the association of different bacterial communities with A. tamarense and C. polykrikoides may be required for HABs.