Everyone agrees that Baikal is our unique national treasure, but at the state level there is still no conscious strategy for its use. Understanding of the lake’s resource potential is extremely limited: all implemented lake development strategies involve direct exploitation, and this multiplies ecosystem risks and environmental problems. Recently, the Accounts Chamber admitted that the gigantic funds allocated for the development of the Baikal region are being spent on the wrong things. Meanwhile, there is a much more effective and modern way of developing the Baikal territories - investing in biotechnological science and production, the rich basis for the development of which is provided by the unique fauna of Baikal itself.

Nowadays, a simple resource approach dominates in relation to Baikal: it is seen solely as the potential for the development of tourism, the water sales industry, the extraction of omul and seals, the harvesting of timber, wild plants and other natural resources. This logic is deeply flawed not only because it can harm Baikal, but also from an economic point of view: this is yesterday, the industries of the last century, the raw material paradigm, while the main driving forces of the new industrial revolution now are digitalization, robotization and biotechnology. And it is in the field of biotechnology that Baikal has an underestimated competitive advantage.

Biotechnology is a discipline that studies the possibilities of using living organisms, their cellular systems or their metabolic products to solve specific technological problems, be it the creation of living organisms with specified properties using genetic engineering methods or the isolation of new medicinal compounds and useful substances from living nature and their subsequent production on an industrial scale. This is not a new idea: most existing medicines are based on natural prototypes. Thus, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis was obtained in the 1940s. American scientist of Russian origin Zelman Waksman as a result of studying the soil. The scientist observed the process of destruction of the tuberculosis bacillus in it, identified the microorganisms responsible for this and the substance they synthesize. Currently, the global market for enzyme bioengineering for inexpensive antibiotics alone exceeds $7 billion.

Where in nature to look for future medicines? This search is largely blind, so it is more effective where nature itself gives us the maximum material for this search, that is, in places of greatest biological diversity. On the territory of Russia, the main such place is Lake Baikal. Its ecosystem is characterized by the massive development of endemic, i.e., forms living there and only there with unique biochemical and molecular processes and properties. The Baikal Library of Endemic Genetic Resources is a rich collection of potential donors of material for constructing genetic constructs. Moreover, many of the specimens in it are unique, such as, for example, the only deep-sea freshwater fauna in the world. This is more than a thousand different species inhabiting a depth zone of more than a kilometer with very unfavorable conditions: the water there is practically distilled and very cold, there is no light, and the pressure is extremely high. But the main problem of the deep-sea fauna of Baikal is not the characteristics of the environment, but the feeding habits. All bottom inhabitants are scavenger species, their food is organic remains and corpses of dead animals, this food is very unhealthy, always infected with something. Therefore, all these deep-sea scavengers are forced to continuously fight infections that they inevitably absorb during the feeding process, and over millions of years of evolution, Baikal endemics have learned to do this extremely effectively. They either produce antimicrobial substances themselves (for example, antimicrobial peptides), or acquire helpers - symbiotic bacteria that produce the disinfecting antibiotics they need. Biologists began targeted research and the search for new antibiotics from Baikal deep-sea crustaceans quite recently, less than five years ago, but have already obtained several thousand unique strains of bacteria producing substances with antimicrobial properties, and isolated from them a series of compounds previously unknown to the pharmaceutical world. Antibiotics belonging to the angucycline class are of particular value: they exhibit not only antimicrobial but also anticancer properties.

The enormous diversity and complete lack of development of the Baikal fauna open up stunning prospects for launching an entire industry to search, isolate and bring to market new effective antibiotics and other bioactive compounds. Baikal is home to more than 2,500 unique species of animals and hundreds of thousands of microorganisms, each of which has the potential to be the source of a compound unknown to the global pharmaceutical industry (and according to the Higher School of Economics, the projected size of the global market for genetically engineered drugs is more than $490 billion, veterinary drugs – $18 billion).

But the list of superpowers of Baikal endemics is not limited to this. Deep-sea crustaceans live in pitch darkness and are forced to travel vast distances in search of food. To find food, they developed extremely efficient chemoreception (sense of smell) systems, as well as highly sensitive visual pigments for sensing light. These light-activated proteins, opsins, have great potential for use in optogenetics - a technology for controlling processes occurring in a living organism at the cellular level using light of a specific wavelength. Optogenetic techniques are today the vanguard of methods for studying the nervous system and brain. The projected valuation of the global optogenetics market for 2020 is $53 billion.

And that's not all either. The most famous property of Baikal water is its purity, which makes it a resource much more important than just drinking water. In winter, this water on Baikal forms very transparent ice that transmits light well. This is one of the key ecosystem factors on Baikal: thanks to the transparent ice in winter, life in the lake does not freeze (as in other bodies of water), but, on the contrary, there is a winter peak in the development of photosynthetic plankton - the smallest algae that grow in the cold, with temperatures around zero, subglacial layers Many organisms feed on water. They are amazingly cold-resistant: in the process of evolution, these organisms have developed biochemical and cellular mechanisms that allow them to function in conditions close to the freezing point. These mechanisms of low-temperature adaptation are of great interest for the creation of technologies for cryopreservation of cells, tissues, organs or, for example, for the creation of cold-resistant organisms and cultures using genetic engineering methods.

The range of biotechnological problems that can be solved on Lake Baikal is very wide - I have mentioned only a small fraction of them here. Baikal biosystem resources can become one of the most important sources of raw materials, the “new oil” of the biotechnological economy of the 21st century. The capacity of the technology application markets is hundreds of billions of dollars. So, in such conditions, is it worth developing the industries of the last century on Lake Baikal? There are resources and political will to develop Baikal; the point is to draw the attention of decision makers to the biotechnological potential of Baikal.

The author is director of the Biology Research Institute of Irkutsk State University, scientific director of the Baikal Research Center

How to develop Baikal in a new way