Coastal countries have traditionally relied on the existing marine resources (e.g., fishing, food, transport, recreation, and tourism) as well as tried to support new economic endeavors (ocean energy, desalination for water supply, and seabed mining). Modern societies and lifestyle resulted in an increased demand for dietary diversity, better health and well-being, new biomedicines, natural cosmeceuticals, environmental conservation, and sustainable energy sources. These societal needs stimulated the interest of researchers on the diverse and underexplored marine environments as promising and sustainable sources of biomolecules and biomass, and they are addressed by the emerging field of marine (blue) biotechnology. Blue biotechnology provides opportunities for a wide range of initiatives of commercial interest for the pharmaceutical, biomedical, cosmetic, nutraceutical, food, feed, agricultural, and related industries. This article synthesizes the essence, opportunities, responsibilities, and challenges encountered in marine biotechnology and outlines the attainment and valorization of directly derived or bio-inspired products from marine organisms. First, the concept of bioeconomy is introduced. Then, the diversity of marine bioresources including an overview of the most prominent marine organisms and their potential for biotechnological uses are described. This is followed by introducing methodologies for exploration of these resources and the main use case scenarios in energy, food and feed, agronomy, bioremediation and climate change, cosmeceuticals, bio-inspired materials, healthcare, and well-being sectors. The key aspects in the fields of legislation and funding are provided, with the emphasis on the importance of communication and stakeholder engagement at all levels of biotechnology development. Finally, vital overarching concepts, such as the quadruple helix and Responsible Research and Innovation principle are highlighted as important to follow within the marine biotechnology field. The authors of this review are collaborating under the European Commission-funded Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action Ocean4Biotech – European transdisciplinary networking platform for marine biotechnology and focus the study on the European state of affairs.

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Marine organisms produce a vast diversity of metabolites with biological activities useful for humans, e.g., cytotoxic, antioxidant, anti-microbial, insecticidal, herbicidal, anticancer, pro-osteogenic and pro-regenerative, analgesic, anti-inflammatory, anticoagulant, cholesterol-lowering, nutritional, photoprotective, horticultural or other beneficial properties. These metabolites could help satisfy the increasing demand for alternative sources of nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, cosmeceuticals, food, feed, and novel bio-based products. In addition, marine biomass itself can serve as the source material for the production of various bulk commodities (e.g., biofuels, bioplastics, biomaterials). The sustainable exploitation of marine bio-resources and the development of biomolecules and polymers are also known as the growing field of marine biotechnology. Up to now, over 35,000 natural products have been characterized from marine organisms, but many more are yet to be uncovered, as the vast diversity of biota in the marine systems remains largely unexplored. Since marine biotechnology is still in its infancy, there is a need to create effective, operational, inclusive, sustainable, transnational and transdisciplinary networks with a serious and ambitious commitment for knowledge transfer, training provision, dissemination of best practices and identification of the emerging technological trends through science communication activities. A collaborative (net)work is today compelling to provide innovative solutions and products that can be commercialized to contribute to the circular bioeconomy. This perspective article highlights the importance of establishing such collaborative frameworks using the example of Ocean4Biotech, an Action within the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) that connects all and any stakeholders with an interest in marine biotechnology in Europe and beyond.

Identifying routes of invasion is a critical management strategy in controlling the spread of invasive species. This is challenging however in the absence of direct evidence. Therefore, indirect methodologies are used to infer possible invasion sources and routes, such as comparisons of genetic and morphological data from populations from invasive ranges and putative source areas. The greater white-toothed shrew (Crocidura russula) was first discovered in Ireland from skeletal remains in the pellets of birds of prey collected in 2007 and is it is now sufficiently established that the species has a detrimental impact on Ireland's small mammal community. In this study, we address the uncertain origin(s) of the Irish population of C. russula. The cytochrome b gene of mitochondrial DNA was analysed from 143 individuals from throughout its range within a phylogenetic and approximate Bayesian computation framework. These analyses revealed that the Irish population stemmed from Europe as opposed to North Africa. Additionally, mandibles from 523 individuals from Ireland and 28 other European populations were subjected to multivariate and distance-based analyses, which demonstrated an association between the Irish population and those in France, Switzerland and Belgium. When the genetic and morphological analyses were considered together, an origin stemming from France was deemed the most likely scenario for the source of the invasive Irish population. This study has demonstrated the importance of utilising a multidisciplinary approach when attempting to identify the origins and invasion routes of invasive species

The mitochondrial cytochrome C oxidase subunit I gene (COI) is commonly used in environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding studies, especially for assessing metazoan diversity. Yet, a great number of COI operational taxonomic units (OTUs) or/and amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) retrieved from such studies do not get a taxonomic assignment with a reference sequence. To assess and investigate such sequences, we have developed the Dark mAtteR iNvestigator (DARN) software tool. For this purpose, a reference COI-oriented phylogenetic tree was built from 1,593 consensus sequences covering all the three domains of life. With respect to eukaryotes, consensus sequences at the family level were constructed from 183,330 sequences retrieved from the Midori reference 2 database, which represented 70% of the initial number of reference sequences. Similarly, sequences from 431 bacterial and 15 archaeal taxa at the family level (29% and 1% of the initial number of reference sequences respectively) were retrieved from the BOLD and the PFam databases. DARN makes use of this phylogenetic tree to investigate COI pre-processed sequences of amplicon samples to provide both a tabular and a graphical overview of their phylogenetic assignments. To evaluate DARN, both environmental and bulk metabarcoding samples from different aquatic environments using various primer sets were analysed. We demonstrate that a large proportion of non-target prokaryotic organisms, such as bacteria and archaea, are also amplified in eDNA samples and we suggest prokaryotic COI sequences to be included in the reference databases used for the taxonomy assignment to allow for further analyses of dark matter. DARN source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/hariszaf/darn and as a Docker image at https://hub.docker.com/r/hariszaf/darn.