About the symposium Sponges, Corals, and the World to be held at the CEAB (29-30-31 Mars 2017). Iosune Uriz. 23 d’abril del 2017. Seminaris del CEAB.
I shortly will present the Sponges, Corals and the World, a three-days conference to be held at the CEAB from 29 to 31 Mars 2017. This is an international symposium on marine sciences, blue business and society, which resulted from a joint initiative of three EC-funded projects: BluePharmTrain, Atlas, and SponGES. We used, as an excuse, the final meeting of the BluePharmTrain Project, a ITN Marie Curie Project (People call, XVII FrameProgram) involving 12 Research Institutes and Universities and 7 Companies, coordinated from the Wageningen University (Detmer Sipkema) and the CEAB as Spanish partner. The ITN Project has trained 11 PhD and two Postdoctoral students on novel biotechnologies based on marine sponges and their microsymbionts with the aim of overpassing identified bottlenecks in the field of natural drugs from marine organisms. The symposium aims were to bring together scientific, industrial, and societal stakeholders in blue biotechnologies ranging from basic science to sponge metagenomics, and meta transcryptomics, culture of symbiotic microbes and sponge cells, and transgeny of target model sponges and corals with an applied interest, and the final meeting will consist of presentations by the Project students. The final BluePharmTrain meeting, will be followed by presentations (days 30 and 31) on two recently started projects (Horizon 2020, Blue Growth BG1) based on deep marine ecosystems: Atlas with a more integrative vision of ecosystems and SponGES just focusing on sponge assemblages.
