The Marine Biodiscovery Centre (MBC), University of Aberdeen, was established in 2010 and its research predominantly concerns marine natural product chemistry including microbial strain isolation, chemical isolation, and structural determination using spectroscopic methods. There are exciting projects focused on the discovery of biologically active molecules in a range of disease areas such treatments for parasitic infections, cancer, bacterial/fungal infections, and inflammation. The MBC an integrated facility with state-of-the-art equipment for the discovery of new products from marine bioresources as well as their synthesis and modification. It houses unique analytical facilities for structural characterisation. There are few dedicated facilities for biodiscovery worldwide and the MBC is at the vanguard of exploration of bioresources for medical and non-medical applications. The MBC co-locates synthetic chemists, medicinal chemists, natural product chemists, analytical chemists, molecular biologists and microbiologists. It incorporates work on natural products from marine invertebrates, plants, bacteria and fungi.

Role in BlueRemediomics: To discover new antimicrobial peptides using a pipeline of bioinformatics, gene synthesis, heterologous expression and compound isolation/identification. To establish new modalities in access and benefit sharing will be established that balance sustainable and equitable use of marine genetic resources with intellectual property protection. To explore community responses to scientific developments with Town Hall events, in the context of “do no significant harm“.