Research Infrastructures - EMBRIC

H2020 RI

The EMBRIC (European Marine Biological Research Infrastructure Cluster) project resulted from the UGent involvement in the ESFRI research infrastructure EMBRC (European Marine Biological Resource center) and is designed to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and innovation from marine bioresources.

In order to unlock the vast potential of marine organisms EMBRIC will interconnect science, industry and policy. By clustering existing regional research infrastructures, joint scientific-industrial developments, facility access and technology & knowledge transfer will be facilitated. EMBRIC will, over the next 4 years, directly connect 27 partners (universities, institutions, non-for-profit and SME’s) to foster innovations in marine biotechnologies in mainly two specific sectors, namely: marine natural product discovery and aquaculture marker-assisted fish selection. The EMBRIC headquarters, situated in Paris (UPMC) under the coordination of Prof. Bernard Kloareg (UPMC, Roscoff) and its partners will bring Europe’s Marine Blue Bio-economy forward.

The EMBRIC cluster aims to promote new applications in fields such as drug discovery, diagnostics, novel foods and food ingredients, aquaculture and agriculture, bioremediation, biomaterials, cosmetics and bioenergy. Most European marine biology laboratories are located in peripheral maritime regions, often far from the industry and major research centres involved in ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures). Therefore, EMBRIC will build a cluster connecting marine biological resource centres providing access to marine organisms (EMBRC) and other specific expertise groups such as MIRRI (prokaryotes and fungi), AQUAEXCEL (finfish), EU-OPENSCREEN (product discovery), ELIXIR (data services) and three private companies (TunaTech GmbH, Xelect ltd. and Scalpro sa).

 

Objectives

These are the objectives of EMBRIC:

  • Develop common practices and high quality services for access to marine biological, analytical and data resources
  • Strengthen the science-industry connection by supporting and engaging technology and knowledge transfer
  • Geographically defragment public and private-sector blue-biotechnology communities by involving regional research, development and innovation policy makers with EMBRIC

    Role of Ghent University

    The role of the Ghent University is twofold:

    • The marine biology research group, which has a long tradition in coordinating training activities will be responsible for building a supporting framework to organize training opportunities and exchange of technology, knowledge and best practice (see https://www.ugent.be/we/biology/en/research/marbiol and www.marinetraining.eu)
    • The laboratory of protistology and aquatic ecology will contribute to breeding and analysing improved microalgae for blue biotechnology applications (see www.pae.ugent.be)

     

    WEBSITE: http://www.embric.eu/

    Contact

    Prof. Dr. Ann Vanreusel
    Department of Biology
    Marine Biology research group
    Phone number: 09/264.85.21
    E-mail:

    Dr. Thibaud Mascart
    Department of Biology
    Marine Biology research group
    Marine Training Platform
    Phone number: 09/264.85.16
    E-mail:

    Dr. Tim Deprez
    Department of Biology
    Marine Biology research group
    Marine Training Platform
    Phone number: 09/264.85.26
    E-mail:

    Prof. Dr. Wim Vyverman
    Department of Biology
    Protistology and aquatic ecology
    Phone number: 09/264.85.01
    E-mail: