ERA-NET: Advanced Marine Biotechnology toolbox for accessing the uncultivated marine microbial biodiversity and its novel biomolecules
Informations
- Funding country
Norway- Acronym
- -
- URL
- -
- Start date
- 1/1/2018
- End date
- 12/31/2022
- Budget
- 329,886 EUR
Fundings
| Name | Role | Start | End | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BIOTEK2021 - Biotechnology for value creation | Grant | - | - | 329,886 EUR |
Abstract
The European ERA-net project MarBioTech project develops new tools and technologies to advance function-based discovery in combination with DNA sequence-based approaches and to deliver valuable new biomolecules of marine origin. The innovative technology to be developed in the project will be applied to screen a wide range of existing marine microbial consortia of marine alga, jelly fish, and marine fish farms, among others, and to identify novel active marine biomolecules with high commercial potential. Such molecules will include new enzymes involved in marine plastic degradation, fluorescent proteins for molecular medicine, novel highly active enzymes for molecular biology applications, and proteins capable of preventing harmful biofilm formation. The MarBioTech consortium consists of the Universities of Hamburg and Kiel, Germany, the University of Vancouver, Canada, the Norwegian research organization SINTEF, and Norwegian biotech company ArcticZymes AS, well known for their products in the field of molecular research and diagnostics. In the current reporting period, the project focus of the work at SINTEF has been on the adaption of assays targeting enzymes that can degrade plastics including polycaprolactone (PCL) and poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) for high-throughput screening, as well as the development of screening assays for DNA-acting enzymes. In addition, several enzyme candidates of these classes have been identified through mining SINTEF's internal and public sequence databases. Library screening using the newly established assays and characterization of novel enzymes from both, sequence data mining and functional screening, in addition to joint publication of project results, will be the main foci in the remainder of the project.