Objective
Problems to be solved
The objectives of this project for industrial, life science oriented marine product research are aiming at natural products as leads and/or enzymes, which are: target specific, aiming at defined classes of industrial life science effects, minimise unwanted side effects, relying on bio-sedimentary sources which are accessible, in a technical, economic and institutional sense, also for repeated re-sampling and re-supply, amount to products obtainable by cultivation or other bioengineering, and be obtained in sufficient quantities in a cost effective and environmental manner.
Scientific objectives and approach
Sediments containing typical marine bacteria, known or expected to be producers of secondary metabolites from selected coastal, shelf and deep-sea areas of the North-East Atlantic and other open ocean regions are to be compared. Sedimentary-microbiological and symbiotic interactions, constituting factors of the sea floor in all water depth, are investigated and quantified. Sediment samples from an enclosed sea with oceanographic-environmental parameters different from the open ocean, the Mediterranean, and the eastern Mediterranean in particular, are special regional targets. Additional steps are cultivation experiments in the lab, isolation and pre-screening. Further tasks are the study of cultivation opportunities in the ocean, characterisation of bacteria and their secondary metabolites, structure elucidation, lead oriented multi-screening and bioassays. A general evaluation of responsible uses by life science industries and of existing and forthcoming rules and regulations will complement the research on the commercial and regulatory side. Application and adaptation of well-proven methods and necessary new developments of marine sampling and in-site monitoring methods and equipment is a basic marine technology requirement. But also the logistics, the political and financial implications of oceanic bio-prospecting are important subtasks in finding optimised search strategies: where to look, how, and with whom, how to process samples, obtain and optimise cultures for lead identification in a cost effective and environmentally acceptable way, fast and reliably, from sedimentary micro organisms in the ocean.
Expected impacts
Main results are: optimised marine search strategies based on marine bio-sedimentary ecosystems, and on adapted and new methods and tools, identification of micro-organisms, culturable at normal pressure, and specialists, productivity: which organism grow under which conditions and produces enzymes and/or secondary metabolites, number of hits, and lead candidates, concept for an eventual industrial use of ocean sediment micro organisms in a safe and environmentally responsible approach.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
10623 Berlin
Germany