European Research Infrastructure for Marine Bioprospecting

A research partnership to create a pipeline of marine bioprospecting services to enable the discovery of novel bioactive natural products

Project dates: 01 January 2024 to 31 December 2026
EMBRC-BE role: UGent (BGRL) is a partner.
Funding: € 4 997 568,13 (Horizon Europe, under grant agreement number 101131663)

The main objective of the EUREMAP consortium is to optimise the marine bioprospecting pipeline in Europe to enable state-of-the-art research and capacity for both academia and industry. The ambition is to leverage strengths available within European Research Infrastructures (RIs) and to align capacities and resources of the multidisciplinary field of marine bioprospecting. Hence, to increase
the competitiveness of marine natural products in the field of drug discovery and to strengthen the blue bioeconomy in Europe, we will assemble a new pipeline that aligns and integrates the existing technical capacities and multidisciplinary expertise of the three European RIs - EU-OPENSCREEN (EU-OS), EMBRC and ELIXIR - in the field of marine natural products discovery. EUREMAP will develop
a unique trans-RI integrated service in an European priority area, the blue economy. The pipeline will be an important part of the European blue growth strategy to stimulate economic growth through innovations in marine biotechnology. The potential for innovations and value creation in the blue biotechnology sector is high, and the sector is characterised by being multidisciplinary, knowledge-intensive and built on technology. Building a new European transnational RI service platform to support the competitiveness of an academic and industrial community in all aspects of this multidisciplinary field. EUREMAP will bring together an experienced, multidisciplinary consortium across three RIs to support and enable the discovery of novel bioactive natural products from marine organisms by utilizing novel technology to improve the capacity of European RIs.

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