11-12 December 2019

Naples, Italy

About

The workshop "Genomics for a Blue Economy" aims at identifying the state-of-the-art of methods, potential challenges, and future directions in the characterization of marine natural compounds and their applications as biotechnological and pharmaceutical products.

The huge biodiversity hosted in the oceans stimulate the research for bioactive molecules from marine bioresources for applications in the field of biotechnology.

  To exploit these promising biological resources and avoiding impoverishing marine resources, new strategies in the pipeline and a new cohort of cross disciplinary trained scientists are needed.

  Systems biology approaches, such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, are now being adapted to update natural product discovery platforms. 

   This innovation is in rapid development in terms of sequencing technology, synthetic biology and bioinformatics, with increasing numbers of whole-genome sequences becoming available.

    Still, a great disparity remains between the genetic potential for natural product production and the actual expression of biosynthetic gene clusters under laboratory culture conditions to produce a biomedically important metabolite.

    Many genomes appear indeed to possess “silent” or cryptic biosynthetic gene clusters, the products of which appear to be regulated by a variety of environmental factors, and therefore remain largely undetected even by the most sophisticated metabolomics techniques.

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