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Accelerated Seaweed Production for Innovative and Robust seaweed aquaculture in Europe

Project description

Strengthening seaweed aquaculture in Europe

Seaweed cultivation is the fastest growing aquaculture sector in Europe. The red algae Palmaria palmata is a target species of the European seaweed industry due to its high protein content (between 20% and 35%), essential minerals, and appealing flavour. However, current aquaculture still uses randomly collected wild types of Palmaria. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) ASPIRE project will develop fast growing seaweed strains by screening and characterising high yielding and robust Palmaria strains. The project will use advanced sequencing and bioinformatics tools (TASSEL pipeline) to identify the biochemical and genetic markers of high-yielding Palmaria strains. ASPIRE will establish an innovative web-based database (MySQL, VueJS) and perform farm-level trials to validate the productivity of the selected elite seaweed strains.

Objective

The ASPIRE project will develop fast growing seaweed strains to strengthen Europe’s potential to thrive in an emerging seaweed aquaculture industry. Seaweed cultivation is the fastest growing aquaculture sector and provides huge potential for market growth in Europe. The red algae Palmaria palmata is one of the target species of a growing European seaweed industry due to its high content of protein (20–35%), essential minerals and its appealing flavour. Recently, there has been significant advancements in the aquaculture procedures for Palmaria, but these approaches are still mainly built on the utilisation of randomly collected wild-types of Palmaria. A targeted strain selection has therefore huge potential to increase the prospects of Palmaria aquaculture in Europe. The objective of the ASPIRE project is to screen and characterise high- yielding and robust Palmaria strains. This will be implemented utilising high-throughput phenotyping technologies using performance screening (growth, morphology characteristics and photosynthetic parameters) and metabolomic analysis (primary/secondary metabolites using GC-MS, spectrophotometer, NMR etc.). These results in conjunction with next generation sequencing (Illumina seq.) and bioinformatics tools (TASSEL pipeline) will be utilised to identify both biochemical and genetic markers of high-yielding Palmaria strains. To ensure that the results have a high impact and find their way to the commercial end-user, the project will establish a novel and easy-to-use web-based database (MySQL, VueJS) specifically designed for use by the aquaculture stakeholders. The ASPIRE project will conduct farm-level trials to validate the advantages of growing the selected elite seaweed strains in terms of productivity and overall biomass quality. The multi-disciplinary project will set the bases for an urgently needed modern seaweed breeding programme to further develop the emerging European seaweed aquaculture sector.

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Topic(s)

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HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITY OF GALWAY
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 215 534,40
Address
UNIVERSITY ROAD
H91 Galway
Ireland

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Region
Ireland Northern and Western West
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

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