BluePharmTrain: biology and Biotechnology of Marine Sponges

BluePharmTrain is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network of 17 European academic and industrial partners collaborating to train young scientists in multidisciplinary aspects of blue biotechnology. Harvesting marine sponges for the extraction of bioactive compounds is often highly unsustainable, and the chemical synthesis of promising compounds is often either too complex or very expensive. To find sustainable and economically feasible production methods of sponge-derived compounds, individual BluePharmTrain research projects explore innovative techniques, focusing on selected sponge species shown to harbour interesting active metabolites. The different techniques include sponge cell cultivation, cultivation of microbial symbionts, next-generation sequencing approaches (i.e. metagenomics and metatranscriptomics), in situ and ex situ cultivation of sponges, life cycle characterisation, chemical structure elucidation of compounds and compound metabolic pathway description. Altogether, these consorted efforts and collaborations lead to new insights on sponge metabolism, sponge-microbe interactions and bioactive compound production.