Besides the importance of our oceans as oxygen factories, food providers, shipping pathways and tourism enablers, they hide an unprecedented wealth of opportunities. Marine organisms and microorganisms can be investigated and their primary and secondary metabolites can be used as lead agents for nutraceutical and pharmaceutical industries to improve our processes (e.g. in drug delivery) and as a source of bio-inspired material for numerous biotechnological applications. The important marine (blue) biotechnology field has gained visibility worldwide in many complementary scientific fields and has inspired the creation of several legislative, infrastructural and scientific collaborative networks. Ultimately, this field can become an important driver in economic development, in the creation of innovative clusters and in managing the sustainable development of coastal areas at a global scale.
To promote the exploitation of scientific outputs and commercialization of innovative products from marine organisms and microorganisms, a constant dialogue needs to be maintained between the scientific community, the legislative authorities, the industry, and the general public, who are the final beneficiaries and consumers of the developed products and processes. To bridge this gap, a recently launched
COST Action "European transdisciplinary networking platform for marine biotechnology" (Ocean4Biotech) brings together experts in the field of marine biotechnology, to provide a platform for sharing experience, knowledge and technologies, and to design a roadmap for a more efficient and rapid development of marine biotechnology research in Europe and beyond.
With the aim of generating a compendium of processes and technologies as well as to map the current scientific actors in the field of marine biotechnology, this Research Topic invites you to submit original research, reviews, and opinions in all steps of the marine biotechnology development pipeline; from bioprospecting, metabolite/protein/enzyme/polymer isolation and characterization, dereplication, synthetic optimization, toxicology, bioassay screening, scale-up production, ethics, intellectual property, legislation, to commercialization and sustainability. This will enable the creation of a so-called cookbook for maximizing the impact of marine biotechnology development, which can be used for initiating, improving, and facilitating the dialogue amongst adjunct scientific fields, providing data, experts and their expertise that will, directly and indirectly, enhance blue growth.