Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) visit to Microbiology, UCC

3 Sep 2019

The Marie Curie funded Initial Training Network (ITN)- Marpipe http://www.marpipe.eu/ is a multi-disciplinary alliance of 11 European academic and industrial partners based in 8 European countries working in collaboration to train young researchers in the field of marine drug-discovery.

The consortium is aiming to improve the feasibility of using marine natural products in drug discovery programmes by overcoming the historical and complex bottlenecks, such as low quantities of secondary metabolites, supply issue of biological samples, cultivability and low microbial chemodiversity under standard laboratory conditions, difficulties in isolation, chemical structure elucidation of compounds, early and reliable validation of bioactivity and the best mechanisms of flow-through into exploitation.

Marpipe is also providing a complementary set of network-wide training modules and workshops to the 11 young PhD researchers funded by the project.

One of these training workshops is taking place in UCC last week, with the young scientists receiving training in “Metagenomics and Computational Genomic Strategies for Natural Product Discovery” under the tuition of Professor Marnix Medema from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and Dr Marcus Claesson from the School of Microbiology at UCC. 

The group is being hosted by Professor Alan Dobson a project partner.