A successful first General Assembly of EMBRIC | Marinebiotech

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A successful first General Assembly of EMBRIC

Published on 21 September 2016

The European Marine Biological Research Infrastructure Cluster (EMBRIC) is designed to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and innovation from marine bioresources, and as such aims to promote new applications derived from marine organisms in fields such as drug discovery, novel foods and food ingredients, aquaculture selective breeding, bioremediation, cosmetics and bioenergy.

The first General Assembly were held 12-14 September 2016 at the prestigious Stazione Zoologica Anton Dorn in Naples, Italy. The event gathered about 70 participants from within the EMBRIC cluster. ERA-MBT was invited to participate in this GA to observe the developments having been achieved in EMBRIC during the first project year. The full programme of the event can be seen at http://www.embric.eu/node/661

It was interesting to observe a lot of common areas between EMBRIC and ERA-MBT. During the survey made by ERA-MBT in 2014, questions were asked about how scientists and industry found the situation of research infrastructures in Europe (read the D3.3 Map of Tech-Transfer Practice and Policy on our Outreach page). The answers clearly showed that many infrastructures of good quality existed, but access to them could be difficult and they were scattered. It is thus encouraging to see that EMBRIC has taken up the challenges pointed at, and have initiated a range of activities in the 10 work packages to resolve problems and make the use of European marine research infrastructures optimal.

Among the tasks are new establishments of pipelines for research with specific areas for developing successful chains from source to market. Improving accessibility of biological material was also targeted, as well as improvement of data quality and exchange of samples between institutions. Different WPs otherwise addressed issues such as ‘From microorganisms in the environment to the products on the market’, collaboration on microalgae research, and ‘Genetics of selective breeding in aquaculture’. One WP specifically addressed Transnational Access to research infrastructures and will issue calls for proposals where external users are invited to participate.

Training and best practice was also addressed, and different scenarios of Technology Transfer would be addressed in a workshop to be held in Bergen 6-7 October 2016. It is an open workshop for which participation is encouraged. For further details, see http://www.embric.eu/node/751