The coastal regions in Europe through their S3s acknowledge the potential of Marine Biological Resources (MBRs) and especially blue biotechnologies (technological applications that use marine biological systems, living organisms or derivates to make or modify products or processes for specific uses, as defined by the Convention on Biological Diversity) to generate and promote employment, economic and regional development, contributing to growth and cohesion.

MBRs are one of the main services provided by marine ecosystems. Culture collections of MBRs are key to the systematic research of interesting and unique genes, bioactives and biomaterials from the marine environment with potential for commercial development and job creation in coastal regions.

The EMBRC BioBank (EBB) will set the basis for the common operation of the distributed marine biobanking facilities of the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC) by:

i) Setting up technological tools and common procedures for the ex-situ maintenance of MBRs along the whole phylogenetic tree of life; and:

ii) the application of best practice guidelines throughout the EBB collections to ensure compliance with regulatory framework that sets the rules on access and benefit sharing (ABS) on the use of marine bioresources for commercial and academic research.

iii) the development of innovation use cases involving industrial end users and administrations at the national and European level with competence in regulating ABS for the production of a set of best practice guidelines for ABS compliance when using MBRs for innovation purposes.

The EBB will ultimately facilitate sustainable access to Atlantic marine biodiversity, its associated data, and extractable products for local and international academia and industry users.