Rationale

This reflects an increasing need for developing tools and knowledge for sustainable development of marine based products, including food, feed, nutraceuticals, cosmeceuticals, biomedical, biopolymers, enzymes with industrial applications and a range of other commodities.

Activities

• Support actions towards the exploitation of genetic resources, including bio-prospecting, identification, and the valuation of biological resources. Activities will establish a maximum sustainable yield (MSY) for the use of marine bio-resources to avoid overexploitation and assess the impact and risks from exploiting marine biodiversity.
• Research to enhance knowledge of taxonomy and genomics to provide policy advice for Blue Growth and GES. This action will include genome bioinformatics and computational biology, sequence and structure analysis, molecular evolution and omics technologies.
• Develop new organism models to understand basic biological, ecological and evolutionary processes which underpin the discovery of biotechnology and application of biomimetics.  
• Support coordinated efforts along the value chain from marine biomass to markets to reduce the EUs dependency on imports of biomass. This implies increased supply of marine bioresources through sustainable cultivation of biomass like micro and macro algae and integrated multitrophic aquaculture.

Timescales