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Role of SMEs in other industries It appears that SMEs and education institutions tend to be the main drivers of research into marine biotechnology products. However, one of the obstacles to the advancement of marine biotechnology is the lack of collaboration and agreement between academia and industry, particularly when applied to approach taken to utilising and protecting promising results and the distribution of IP rights for any results. It is unclear whether particular SMEs will look at a range of potential end products or if they focus on the source materials and compounds found. Products and services offered currently and their future prospects The biotechnology sector for other industries is still in its infancy with many products at the research stage but none have been developed for commercial use. Despite promising research results cost effective products for antifouling, in situ monitoring, bioadhesives and bioremediation are still a long way off. Drivers and barriers in other industries The drivers and barriers vary slightly between the industry sectors but there is commonality. The drivers tend to relate to environmental issues such as increasingly stringent environmental legislation being introduced, the demand for eco-friendly products and an overarching move towards greening industrial processes and products. The barriers to the widespread application of marine biotechnology to multiple industry sectors and industrial products and processes are many. The cultivation and culture of marine microorganisms is far from easy and impossible in some cases and this has a profound impact on the supply of, for example, bioactive compounds for research and product development. This in turn can cause issues with the bulk production of products for commercial use (i.e. up-scaling). Furthermore, the complexity of marine microorganisms is such that further advances and improvements in biotechnological analytical tools are required, for example, in the areas of screening, expression and other DNA based technologies, and ‘omics’ approaches. Another barrier that has been identified is the lack of coordination between academic and industry partners at the EU level and a lack of common projects. Some specific barriers to come of the potential industrial products and processes are detailed below: Environmental protection and depollution sector (bioremediation) Marine microorganisms can be difficult to culture in laboratories due to specific conditions required and their production is often limited by low yields (Banat et al., 2000). Further limitations to the usefulness of these products include that oil still often needs to be turned into small droplets for the microbes to consume and petroleum has thousands of components and therefore the required microbial community would be complex. It also depends on the location of the spill as colder, deeper water limits microbial growth. Antifouling Progress in this area is slow due to a wide variety of reasons. Progress has been slow due to insufficient funding and a lack of strong incentives for scientists to fully commit to finding a solution to fouling. It is also difficult to reproduce known compounds on a large enough scale for commercial purposes due to the costs and the fact that many compounds are produced in organisms in very low quantities and it is not sustainable to harvest these organisms directly from the marine environment and laboratories often are unable to conduct as many replicates of tests due to the limited supply (Qian et al 2010). Another issue for the development of antifoulants through biotechnology is the fact that the necessary infrastructure for this research, in particular broad160 Study in support of Impact Assessment work on Blue Biotechnology

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