Abstract
Marine biotechnology is the key to harness the huge economic potential of the unique biodiversity of marine organisms. This potential remains largely underexploited due to three major issues: (1) lack of connectivity between research services, (2) practical and cultural difficulties in connecting science with industry and (3) uneven regional development and innovation policies throughout Europe. The European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC) is a distributed Research Infrastructure (RI) with facilities located in renowned marine biological stations and institutes across Europe. On its way to become a European Research Infrastructure Consortium, EMBRC will be the reference RI for marine biology and ecology research. Yet, EMBRC recognizes the necessity to interface with other RIs to enable specialized workflow services in, e.g. chemical biology, bioinformatics and social sciences. The European Marine Biological Research Infrastructure Cluster (EMBRIC, INFRA DEV 4 2014–2015) was designed to connect EMBRC with cognate RI, i.e. MIRRI, EU-OPENSCREEN, ELIXIR and AQUAEXCEL. The cluster combines the RIs services into discovery pipelines through which academic and private research users can run their projects. EMBRIC also relies on the Integrating Activity of RISIS to analyse regional innovation ecosystems in marine biology and ecology and to develop a methodology to measure the impact of the project. The EMBRIC alliance provides workflows on a variety of marine bioresources, a strategy that will boost EMBRC expert centres into regional innovation clusters. This will reconcile the need for marrying scientific and technological excellence with territorial development, resulting in the promotion of the blue bioeconomy.
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Notes
- 1.
“The Potential Role of Regions in the Development of European Research Infrastructures: The Example of the European Marine Biological Resources Centre (EMBRC)”: https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/maritimeforum/en/node/2715
- 2.
cf. Declarations at the 2nd International Conference on Research Infrastructures: http://www.icri2014.eu/
- 3.
See the full description of TRLs in the Horizon 2020 programme here: https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/wp/2014_2015/annexes/h2020-wp1415-annex-g-trl_en.pdf
- 4.
The circular economy describes the idea of “closing the loop” of product life cycles through increased recycling and reuse of resources that overall benefits the environment and the economy. See the EU Action Plan for the Circular Economy: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52015DC0614
- 5.
EFSI platforms are referred to as platforms that consist in Special purpose vehicles, managed accounts, contract-based co-financing or risk-sharing arrangements or arrangements established by any other means by which entities channel a financial contribution in order to finance a number of investment projects (Regulation (EU) 2015/1017 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 June 2015 on the European Fund for Strategic Investments, the European Investment Advisory Hub and the European Investment Project Portal and amending Regulations (EU) No 1291/2013 and (EU) No 1316/2013—the European Fund for Strategic Investments, Official Journal of the European Union, L 169, 1 July 2015).
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Acknowledgements
The EMBRIC project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 654008.
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Piña, M. et al. (2018). The European Marine Biological Research Infrastructure Cluster: An Alliance of European Research Infrastructures to Promote the Blue Bioeconomy. In: Rampelotto, P., Trincone, A. (eds) Grand Challenges in Marine Biotechnology. Grand Challenges in Biology and Biotechnology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69075-9_10
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