Co-cultures of algae and cyanobacteria are crucial for the study of microbial interactions in the environment and the production of valuable compounds for biotechnological purposes. One of the main challenges of working with co-cultures are the analysis of the system and the determination of the interaction mechanism. In this work, we present the theoretical background of algae-cyanobacteria co-cultures and propose a method for determining the population sizes of cyanobacteria or algae in co-cultures. The method is based on the measurement of photosynthetic pigment fluorescence and the calculation of cell number via a calibration curve. Since various photosynthetic organisms possess different pigments, specific pigment fluorescence could be used to determine the population size of a particular species. Dependence on the difference in pigments is also the proposed method's major flaw, as this requirement drastically limits the number of organisms suitable for this method. Before using the method, the selected co-culture must also meet several other conditions. We present some preliminary experiments, which can be used to determine these conditions.
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