The European Blue Biobank (EBB) project, the first project of the “Interreg Atlantic Area” call, led by the Marine Research Centre of the University of Vigo, has two fundamental objectives. On the one hand, to coordinate the biobanks that are within the European Marine Biological Resource Centre, EMBRC, (European research infrastructure dedicated to fundamental and applied marine biology, of which ECIMAT is part) and, on the other hand, to prepare and support the EMBRC marine stations and their users in complying with the provisions of the new regulations on access to genetic resources. In the same vein, the project aims to help national and European administrations to ensure that the implementation of these regulations is as efficient as possible and to raise awareness among end users of genetic resources about the need to comply with these regulations.
In this context, the EBB work team is making a significant effort to inform and raise awareness among the scientific community, and more specifically those that research the properties of biological resources. The first conference on the project was held at ECIMAT on February 19 by Antonio Villanueva, who presented the project to researchers from CIM-UVigo, IEO and CSIC. The videoconference is permanently available at the following link “ABS: are you talking about my car brakes?”.
After this first intervention, the EBB team participated in several working days within the framework of other research projects, due to the high interest in the implications for research staff of the new regulations on access to marine genetic resources. Thus, on July 10, Fiz da Costa, manager of the EBB project (CIM-UVigo) and Belén Sánchez, professor of public international law at the University of Vigo and participant in the EBB project, presented the conferences “European Blue Biobank” and “Legal issues related to access and use of genetic resources: From the Convention on Biological Diversity to the Nagoya Protocol and its implementation in Spain” at the Marine Research Institute (IIM-CSIC) respectively. During these days, researchers from the Galician Biological Mission-CSIC in Pontevedra, the IIM-CSIC in Vigo, the CETMAR (Vigo) and other institutions and the general public discussed for about 3 hours the implications of the Nagoya Protocol and the related regulations in the development of research projects.
Yesterday, September 23, Fiz da Costa was invited to the workshop “Cockroach Cultivation Procedures“, organized by the University of Aveiro (Portugal) within the framework of the COCKLES project of the European Interreg Atlantic Area initiative. During this workshop, he presented the report “Access and use of marine genetic resources: new regulations and how to apply them“.
This initiative is formed by a multidisciplinary team that includes some of the world’s most important marine collections, marine biotechnology industrial groups, companies dedicated to marine biotechnology and government departments responsible for access to marine genetic resources (“ABS Competent National Authorities” or CNAs), which aim to promote the sustainable use of marine biological resources and facilitate access to their data and extractable products.
