The progresses in bioprospecting of marine genetic resources (MGRs) awarded by China Association of Oceanic Engineering

Recently, the first prize of the Oceanic Engineering Science and Technology was awarded to the project "Deep sea genetic resources investigation and application evaluation", which has been led by the chief scientist Prof. Zongze Shao in the past ten years.

This project is mainly supported by COMRA-China Ocean Mineral Resources R&D Association, mainly by TIO in close cooperation with several other groups in the University of Hong Kong and the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. They together fulfilled a series of innovative technology development in observation of deep-sea microbial diversity, cultivation of the uncultured, and bioprospecting of MGR in situ and the microbial deposits.

This project paved the foundation of the first marine microbial collections and leads to the establishment of Marine Culture Collection of China (MCCC) (www.mccc.org.cn), which now is the partner of national microbial resources bank and a member of World Federation for Culture Collection-WFCC, with marine microbial collection more than 26,000 strains of various origins (up to 2019), quite diverse and of great application potentials including active substance-producing microbes, pollutant-degrading bacteria, and various deep-sea extremophiles such as psychrophilic, thermophilic, pizophilic bacteria and archaea from deep sea sediments, hydrothermal vent fields, etc. These unique microorganisms cherishing great biodiversity and novelty will certainly provide sustainable use in exploitation of innovative medicines, biorefinery, biopesticides, and in environmental bioremediation, synthetic biology and other scientific researches.

These studies have obtained 38 domestic patents and 7 US/European patents, and have published 186 SCI articles. Moreover, these marine genetic resources and derived biotechnologies already lay a solid foundation for marine life science study and practical applications in a close future.

Last Article: Technical Gu... Next Article: China’s Firs...