Acronym MARISURF
Category
Marine Biotechnology
Title Novel, Sustainable Marine Bio-Surfactant / Bio-Emulsifiers for Commercial Exploitation Programme H2020
Instrument (FP6)
Contact Type (FP7)
Strand (Interreg)
NA
Theme (FP7)
Activity Area (FP6)
Regional Area (Interreg)
Action (COST)
NA
Specific Programme (FP7)
NA
Funding source European Coordinator Mihalis Panagiotidis Coordinator email M.Panagiotidis@hw.ac.uk
Coordinator institution
HWU - Heriot-Watt University (United Kingdom)
Institutions involved
NA - Apivita SA (Greece) ,
NA - Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant (Belgium) ,
DUTH - Democritus University of Thrace (Greece) ,
NA - EcoTechSystems Srl (Italy) ,
NA - Leitat Technological Center (Spain) ,
NA - Marlow Foods Ltd (United Kingdom) ,
NA - Nanoimmunotech SL (Spain) ,
NA - Northumbria University (United Kingdom) ,
NA - Nova-Institut für Politische und ökologische Innovation GmbH (Germany) ,
UPATRAS - University of Patras (Greece) ,
NA - University of Ulster (United Kingdom) ,
Start year 2015 End year 2021 Funding (€) € 4,749,648 Website www.marisurf.eu Summary Surfactants and emulsifiers constitute an important class of chemical agents that are widely used in almost every sector of modern industry. The huge market demand is currently met almost exclusively by synthetic, mainly petroleum-based, chemical products, which are usually non-biodegradable and mostly toxic or GM plant based products (used in foods), which are undesirable by some end-users. Their biologically produced counterparts (i.e. bio-surfactants and bio-emulsifiers) offer more green sustainable alternatives. This has led to a number of manufactures, looking for ways to increase competitiveness through searching for underexploited sources such as the marine environment. Our objectives are to develop (1) innovative approaches in discovering, characterizing and producing novel marine-derived bio-surfactants from a large bacterial collection (greater than 500 strains) housed at Heriot Watt University, originally isolated from various coastal and open ocean waters around the world, (2) novel, economic, and eco-friendly end-products with commercial applications in order to replace synthetic counterparts, and (3) to demonstrate the functionality of new product development for commercial exploitation. Our collection consists of novel bacterial species, originally isolated for their ability to degrade oils, with proven promise in this respect. For this reason, our consortium (consisting of academic institutions, industrial companies and end-users) offering a wide range of expertise, will address the technical bottlenecks for meeting our objectives, namely those of marine resource identification, sustainable supply, discovery pipeline and efficient production in biological systems. The relevance of our proposal to the work programme is underlined by its expected impact in increasing efficiency of discovery pipelines, the development of more economic and eco-friendly end-products and finally in contributing to the implementation of the objectives of the EU Blue Growth.
Keywords
Bioprospecting;
Bioproduct;
Bioactive compounds;
Bacteria;
Marine Region
76
Not associated to marine areas
0
Marine Region Map
