February 19th, Antonio Villanueva, Coordinator of the EBB project, presented at the “Café con Sal” conference cycle, the implications for marine biological researchers of novel regulations regulating access to genetic resources, with the lecture “ABS: are you talking about my car brakes?“.
The scientific community, specifically the one that investigates the genetic and biochemical properties of biological resources, must comply with the new European and National regulations on access and use of genetic resources. However, this need is little known by the research community, and creates an additional burden to the activity.
The most important biobanks of marine organisms in Europe are part of the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC-ERIC), a distributed Research Infrastructure for fundamental and applied marine biology and ecology research of which the ECIMAT is part.
The European Blue Biobank (EBB) project, the first INTERREG Atlantic Area Project lead by the University of Vigo, aims at understanding the limitations imposed by the new regulation, and to prepare the EMBRC stations to support their users in complying with the new regulations, with the final goal of facilitating sustainable access to marine biodiversity, its associated data, and extractable products for local and international users.
This initiative involves a European multidisciplinary team that comprises some of the world´s most important marine culture collections, marine biotechnology clusters and marine biotechnology companies and the government departments responsible for access to genetic resources – the ABS Competent National Authorities (CNAs).
With this conference, Antonio Villanueva, coordinator of this project, aimed to raise awareness among research staff about this legal requirement, giving to the assistants some basic information and some tips to reduce as far as possible the impact of these new regulations on their activity.
The conference took place at the conference room of the ECIMAT at 11:00h (CET) and was live streamed on http://tv.uvigo.es/es/directo/1.html and will be permanently available on CIM and UVigoTV websites.
You can download the presentation in the next link (Presentation AntonioVillanueva – ABS, PDF 4.688 KB)
Vídeos
- Presentation of Antonio Villanueva Alba Hernández, CIM-UVigo
- Conference Antonio Villanueva, CIM-UVigo
- Questions time Antonio Villanueva, CIM-UVigo