Harnessing the Blue: BLUES teams up with CIRCALGAE in Ålesund

We stayed one more day in Norway for a joint workshop with our EU sister project.

We weren’t quite ready to leave Ålesund just yet! The day after our General Assembly, we stayed at the Norwegian Maritime Competence Center (NMK) for Harnessing the Blue, a joint workshop with our sister project CIRCALGAE, once again hosted by our partners at Møreforsking.

After a short introduction to both projects, the local cluster ÅKP gave us a glimpse of the region’s thriving marine innovation scene. Guest talks then took us from the chemical ecology of sea cucumbers to microalgae that help recycle waste streams.

The morning session focused on animal-free testing of new products for human use, with talks on seaweed for cosmetics, anticancer extracts from marine invertebrates and cell cultures from sea cucumbers and sponges. In the afternoon we moved on to marine biomaterials, exploring how sea cucumber peptides, sponge polymers and other marine materials can become scaffolds for 3D cell culture, and how bioreactors can help these cultures grow.

It was a great chance to see how much our research has in common with CIRCALGAE’s, and to swap ideas with researchers and industry from the region.

A big thank you to Møreforsking for organising the day, and to all the speakers for sharing their work.