Bioprospecting and optimised production of marine/aquatic natural products in the omics & artificial intelligence era

Expected Outcome:

Successful proposals should contribute to reaching the impacts of this destination, and European policies, in particular the European Green Deal, the bioeconomy strategy, the new approach for a blue economy. They should help harnessing the full potential of marine and freshwater biological resources and blue biotechnology is leveraged to deliver societal benefits, such as greener more environmentally friendly industrial products and processes, support public health and environmental conservation.

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• demonstrating the broadened range of more sustainable and more accessible marine/aquatic natural products with high value applications;
• demonstrating advances in the development and/or application related computational tools such as AI etc. in the biodiscovery pipeline;
• increased commitment to biodiversity preservation and conservation through enabling bioproduction routes (biosynthesis, fermentation, culturing) of natural products, ensuring that the biodiscovery of new compounds does not lead to unsustainable harvesting from the wild and a sustainable use of genetic diversity;
• awareness raised and creation of a better framework for blue biotechnology innovation and uptake through broad stakeholder engagement, supporting the EU biotechnology and biomanufacturing initiative.

Scope:

The immense diversity of marine/aquatic micro- and macro-organisms and their communities represents a rich and largely unexplored reservoir of natural products and their base ingredients. To survive in habitats ranging from deep-sea sediments to polar regions or shallow waters, marine organisms have developed a broad spectrum of structures, defense mechanisms and metabolic pathways resulting in natural products with vast chemical diversity and wide range of biological activities. The biological interplay between interspecies communities, e.g. symbiotic or defence mechanisms, may offer attractive leads and is also in scope. For the coverage of terrestrial bioprospecting see parallel topic HORIZON-CL6-2025-01-CIRCBIO-08: Bioprospecting and optimized production of the terrestrial natural products: new opportunities for bio-based sectors.

The action covers modern biodiscovery approaches including, in-silico bioprospecting and the full integration of digital methods (e.g., statistics, algorithms, AI, data science, modelling, digital twins) with bioinformatics and biotechnological tools, which make possible the identification and production of bioactive natural compounds with potential high-value application in sectors such as pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, cosmetics, food/feed additives, agrochemicals, etc. In the context of this topic, natural products are understood as biologically active products such as secondary metabolites as well as enzymes derived from marine/aquatic organisms.

Targeted marine/aquatic biological resources can be sourced from their natural environment (in-situ) and/or from open access and public/private collections and gene-banks (ex-situ).

The aim is to broaden the range of novel compounds, lowering the production costs, quicken the development pipeline, and enable more innovation for the industrial operators, with clear-cut benefits for the final users. Projects should have a strong industry drive and include demonstration activities to proof the techno/economic viability of the production of the proposed marine/aquatic natural product(s) and/or the biodiscovery platform tools combining digital and biotechnologies.

The scope covers relevant steps of the biodiscovery process such as isolation and characterization of microbial strains and consortia, genomic characterisation, creation of natural product libraries, bioactivity screening, natural products isolation and purification, chemical structure elucidation or optimized production pathways via biotechnology and biomanufacturing approaches in suitable industrial facilities (bioreactors/biorefineries, e.g. for microbial production), synthetic biology or gene editing. The integration of digital approaches (AI, computer algorithms such as machine learning, modelling, data science etc) on optimizing the biodiscovery processes such as identification of biosynthetic gene clusters and metabolic pathways, enzyme selection, combinatorial assembly and annotation of high-throughput DNA sequencing data, bioactivity prediction, elucidation of the structure of compounds, experimental design etc is in scope. Safety to the end-users and operators needs to be assessed and guaranteed.

Proposals should avoid overlaps with past or ongoing topics (e.g. projects funded under the topic HORIZON-CL6-2022-CIRCBIO-02-05-two-stage: Life sciences and their convergence with digital technologies for prospecting, understanding and sustainably using biological resources, topic HORIZON-CL6-2023-CIRCBIO-01: Broadening the spectrum of robust enzymes and microbial hosts in industrial biotechnology), consider synergies to parallel actions (e.g. HORIZON-CL6-2025-01-CIRCBIO-08: Bioprospecting and optimized production of the terrestrial natural products: new opportunities for bio-based sectors as well as funded under the topic HORIZON-2020-FNR-11-2020 - Prospecting aquatic and terrestrial natural biological resources for biologically active compounds ^[1]). The action is expected to establish links with relevant projects funded under the EU Mission Restore our Ocean and Waters.

The action needs to guarantee biodiversity preservation. This can be addressed, inter alia, by covering propagation of biological material, including by in vitro cultivation, as well as by biotechnology approaches. The action needs to comply with applicable EU regulations and international rules on access to biological resources, their sustainable use and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from their utilisation, including the Nagoya protocol, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF), and the agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). A life-cycle assessment should be carried out to evaluate the environmental, economic, and social impact of the developed product(s). Proposals should contribute to the understanding of potential trade-offs inherent in the exploitation of ecosystems, their potential to deliver ecosystem services and ideally provide solution approaches to address these trade-offs. Potential risks to the environment, ecosystems, and society as well as benefits should also be assessed under this topic.

Proposals are encouraged to consider, where relevant, the services offered by European research infrastructures such as EU-OPENSCREEN, ELIXIR, EMBRC ERIC, IBISBA or other relevant research infrastructures¹³⁸.

[1] https://cordis.europa.eu/programme/id/H2020_FNR-11-2020/en