Transnational Access to
Hellenic Centre for Marine Research
Country
Greece
Expertise
Aquaculture, Biotech, Data, Environment
Liaison officer
Stavros Chatzifotis
Contact
Services offered
The Institute of Marine Biology, Biotechnology and Aquaculture (IMBBC) / Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR), offers four installations:
1) The HCMR-AQUALABS installation enables multidisciplinary research on all stages of aquaculture production (broodstock, eggs, larvae, juveniles, grown-out fish and genetic breeding) of the most commonly cultured Mediterranean species like D. labrax, S. aurata, A. regius and S. dumerili. Consists of i) battery of tanks supplied with an automated feeding system (with video, DO and T sensors)- a nutrition unit of 44 indoor tanks (0.05, 0.2, 0.5 and 17 m3), 6 outdoor tanks of 5 m3 and 18 tanks suitable for the determination of nutrient digestibility coefficients for aquafeeds and feed ingredients,ii) mesocosm tanks supplied with feed chain zone for Artemia and rotifer culture and photobioreactors, iii) biochemical laboratory with GC, HPLC, HPTLC Dumas nitrogen analyser, calorimeter, microscopes and PCs for video and image analysis, iv) net-pen cage unit (Souda) for pilot production at sea.
2) The Genomics & Biodiversity installation (HCMR-BIOGEN), with state-of-the-art laboratories and platforms including a) DNA sequencing platform (capillary Sanger, MiSeq Illumina short-read, and long-read Oxford Νanopore), b) The bioimaging facility (microcomputed tomography scanner), c) structural and chemical analysis (UHPLC system coupled with a tandem mass spectrometry system MS/MS), and d) a coastal experimental installation unique in the Mediterranean (the “Underwater
Biotechnological Park”).
3) The Ecosystem Access & Sampling installation (HCMR-ECO) includes a fully equipped scientific scuba diving facility with highly trained scientific divers and an inflatable boat, as well as sampling equipment. It provides access to coastal ecosystems and biological resources of the oligotrophic and rich-in-biodiversity Eastern Mediterranean Sea (Cretan and Libyan Seas), including hard and soft bottom habitats, Posidonia and algal meadows, sub-marine caves, coralliferous formations, and vermetid reefs.
4) The high-performance computing cluster “Zorbas” (HCMR-HPC), of 400 cores and 5TB memory containing more than 200 bioinformatics packages and pipelines, covering several types of analysis (e.g., assembly, metagenomics, ddRAD analysis, and population genetics).