MARBLES presented at Functional Metagenomics 2024 in South Africa

The sixth Functional Metagenomics Conference of the International Society for Functional Metagenomics was held this year inside the world-renowned Kruger National Park in South Africa!

The conference which took place from 2-5 June 2024, included a wide range of ‘omics’ technologies used in microbiome studies, including the fields of metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics, metaviromics, metabolomics, bioinformatics, 3-D structural mining and others. Functional metagenomics is commonly used to analyse the functionalities of microbial communities at different scales and to find new biomolecules and functions through the use of recombinant DNA/RNA production techniques.

MARBLES was represented and presented by our partner SINTEF with Ingemar Nærdal presenting the poster entitled 'Exploring the microbiomes of four marine sponge species from the Trondheim fjord in Norway' and Alexander Wentzel giving the keynote talk 'Bioprospecting of marine microbial resources in mid-Norway – recent discoveries and future perspectives' during the afternoon session on 3 June 2024. His talk covered key examples from 20 years of marine bioprospecting at SINTEF! It provided an overview of technologies developed and approaches applied to map marine microbial biodiversity and identify new products for applications in human health and a sustainable marine bioeconomy. SINTEF utilise both data-driven approaches such as shotgun metagenome sequencing with bioinformatic analysis as well as more traditional functional approaches such as cloning and screening for traits of interest. Acknowledging the benefits of both strategies, more diversified gene products with the necessary actions can be found through functional screening, while the quick development of sequencing technologies makes it easier to search through different sources for known or very similar genes. Alexander gave an overview of some of the ongoing projects at SINTEF including MARBLES and how they are utilising the more advanced screening techniques of microfluidics.

The main outputs of MARBLES are biocontrol agents for agriculture and aquaculture, based on microbial consortia or naturally occurring compounds as well as pharmaceutically relevant natural compounds and their analogues. This relies heavily on the discovery of novel microbial bioresources which SINTEF are working on with UCC, WU, NATURALIS and DTU.