Discovery pipelines for marine resources : an ocean of opportunity for biotechnology?

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant agreement No 645884. CABI is an international intergovernmental organisation, and we gratefully acknowledge the core financial support from our member countries (and lead agencies) including the United Kingdom (Department for International Development), China (Chinese Ministry of Agriculture), Australia (Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research), Canada (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada), Netherlands (Directorate-General for International Cooperation),and Switzerland (Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation). See https://www.cabi.org/about-cabi/who-we-work-with/key-donors/ for full details.Marine microbial diversity offers enormous potential for discovery of compounds of crucial importance in healthcare, food security and bioindustry. However, access to it has been hampered by the difficulty of accessing and growing the organisms for study. The discovery and exploitation of marine bioproducts for research and commercial development requires state-of-the-art technologies and innovative approaches. Technologies and approaches are advancing rapidly and keeping pace is expensive and time consuming. There is a pressing need for clear guidance that will allow researchers to operate in a way that enables the optimal return on their efforts whilst being fully compliant with the current regulatory framework. One major initiative launched to achieve this, has been the advent of European Research Infrastructures. Research Infrastructures (RI) and associated centres of excellence currently build harmonized multidisciplinary workflows that support academic and private sector users. The European Marine Biological Research Infrastructure Cluster (EMBRIC) has brought together six such RIs in a European project to promote the blue bio-economy. The overarching objective is to develop coherent chains of high-quality services for access to biological, analytical and data resources providing improvements in the throughput and efficiency of workflows for discovery of novel marine products. In order to test the efficiency of this prototype pipeline for discovery, 248 rarely-grown organisms were isolated and analysed, some extracts demonstrated interesting biochemical properties and are currently undergoing further analysis. EMBRIC has established an overarching and operational structure to facilitate the integration of the multidisciplinary value chains of services to access such resources whilst enabling critical mass to focus on problem resolution.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe