Abstract:

The healthy development of lake ecosystems is a global issue. Bacteria are not only an integral component of food webs, but also play a key role in controlling and regulating water quality in lake ecosystems. Hence, in order to provide some suggestions for maintaining the long-term and healthy development of lake ecosystems, this review discusses and analyses concepts and assessment of bacterial diversity, the distribution of bacteria communities, mechanisms of formation, and the ecological functions of such communities in lake water bodies. In total, there are 21 freshwater bacterial phyla typically found in lake waters at present. Among them, Proteobacteria, Cyanobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Actinobacteria and Verrucomicrobia are the most important. The Beijerinck and Baas-Becking perspective and the meta- community hypothesis suggest that bacterial community diversity and species distributions in lake water bodies are caused by the combined action of stochastic and determinate processes. Research on the function of lake bacteria has mainly focused on processes that bacteria are involved in, for example water quality and elemental biogeochemical cycles. Despite efforts over the past 10 years, knowledge on lake bacterial community diversity and function is still very limited. Lake bacterial ecology is still a young science, which restricts people further understanding of microbial communities in lake bodies. Future research is required on: (1) integrating bacterial phenotype, genotype, phylogeny and ecological features to define the concept of bacterial “species”; (2) the dispersal of bacteria between different locations at a regional scale; (3) bacterial community diversity and functional characteristics at the micro scale; (4) ecological theories and hypotheses of bacterial community diversity in lake ecosystems to improve the theoretical framework of microbial ecology.

Key words: bacterial community, lake, diversity, function