Acronym CACHE
Category
Marine Biotechnology
Title Calcium in a changing environment Programme FP7
Instrument (FP6)
Contact Type (FP7)
Strand (Interreg)
FP7 - Networks for Initial Training (ITN)
Theme (FP7)
Activity Area (FP6)
Regional Area (Interreg)
Action (COST)
PEOPLE – Marie Curie Actions
Specific Programme (FP7)
People
Funding source European Coordinator Melody Clark Coordinator email mscl@bas.ac.uk
Coordinator institution
NERC - Natural Environment Research Council (United Kingdom)
Institutions involved
NA - Bielefeld University (Germany) ,
CCMAR - Centre for Marine Sciences (Portugal) ,
GEOMAR - Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research (Germany) ,
MNHN - National Museum of Natural History (France) ,
RBINS - Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (Belgium) ,
SAMS - Scottish Association for Marine Science (United Kingdom) ,
NA - University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom) ,
UGOT - University of Gothenburg (Sweden) ,
Start year 2013 End year 2017 Funding (€) € 3,658,447 Website https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/605051 Summary "Anthropogenic driven climate change is a global problem that will increasingly affect our world and It is essential that we train our future scientists in multidisciplinary approaches to enable them to tackle such complex problems. This ITN examines environmental calcium mobilisation and deposition in marine molluscs, species that have been highlighted as being particularly at risk under future climate change scenarios due to the acidification and warming of the World's oceans. However, surprisingly little is known about how these animals regulate calcium to produce a shell, how these processes might be affected when the environmental conditions change and what the consequences are at the population level. This lack of knowledge significantly impacts on our abilities to accurately predict future biodiversity and the consequences for the commercial aquaculture industry.
CACHE aims to remedy this knowledge deficit with this ITN. We will take an in-depth comparative approach, using four of the EU's most important commercially exploited molluscan species as model organisms and examine natural variation in shell production in combination with experimental manipulations to quantify adaptive potential and identify novel genes/proteins that underpin responses to environmental change. By embedding our projects in natural population surveys, we will gain an unprecedented understanding of the level of phenotypic plasticity that operates in bivalve shell production: an essential prerequisite for understanding their resilience to environmental perturbation. The resulting data will also be integrated into models aimed at predicting future aquaculture scenarios and will lead into efforts at biomimic exploitation for sustainable building materials, providing a genuinely innovative inter-sectoral approach, which will directly contribute to the EU Blue Economy and EU aspirations for sustainable opportunities via ""Blue Growth"".
CACHE trained 13 early-stage researchers, 10 of whom were registered for PhDs at 10 partner institutes in 6 Member States. Three experienced researchers were also hired. They studied how shells are produced and controlled in four of Europe’s most important commercial marine shellfish species: oysters, mussels, clams and scallops. Overall, the aim was to better understand calcium regulation and shell production in the natural marine environment.
The fellows disproved the theory that cellular trafficking of amorphous calcium carbonate in vesicles is involved in the formation of mollusc shells. They identified an evolutionary conserved set of shell extracellular matrix protein and recognised the potential for selection of mollusc strains that are resilient to climate change effects. The team also demonstrated wide-scale phenotypic plasticity of shell morphology in the absence of genetic differentiation, and the environmental drivers that impact shell formation. Efforts have yielded 19 articles in international peer-reviewed journals, with at least another 40 on the way.
CACHE has compiled considerable genetic resources for the four chosen species and made these openly accessible, together with other sequenced mollusc species, via Mollusc-DB, enhancing their visibility and exploitation for shellfish research.
Four publicly available reports targeting the aquaculture industry and key stakeholders were produced on shell waste, biomimicry and future aquaculture. They analyse the uses of shell waste in the circular economy and for biomimetic purposes."
Keywords
Waste valorization;
Scallop;
Bioprospecting;
Mussel;
Bioproduct;
Genomic sequencing;
Biomimicry;
Bivalve;
Wastes;
Genetic;
Biology;
Shellfish;
Mollusc;
Climate change;
Aquaculture development;
Impacts;
Marine Region
76
Not associated to marine areas
0
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