Monday, 6/4/2018
The Universities of Minho and Valencia, Spain,
will host the headquarters of the pan-European Microbial Resource Research
Infrastructure (MIRRI), a platform to facilitate access and legal management of
microbial resources for the development of sustainable solutions in the
biotechnology field.
During this month, the
proposal was supported by the portuguese and spanish governments and was
approved a few days ago at a meeting with representatives of the seven member
countries (Belgium, France, Greece, Latvia, Poland, Portugal and Spain) that
have signed the MIRRI Memorandum of Understanding. The UMinho Gualtar Campus
seat the headquarters of the organization and on the Paterna Campus of the
University of Valencia will be installed the computer and telematic services,
supported by LifeWatch, a worldwide electronic platform for the protection,
management and sustainable use of biodiversity.
MIRRI will be established
as a non-profit legal entity following a model distributed with a central
coordination unit and with "national nodes" in the various partner
states. The infrastructure aims to facilitate access at European level to a
wide range of high-quality microbiological resources and associated data,
generating efficient solutions to the great challenges of contemporary society and
stimulating the interaction between academia and the bioindustry. According to
Eugénio Campos Ferreira, director of the Centre of Biological Engineering, the
research centre where MIRRI will be accomodate, "The MIRRI infrastructure,
the only organization of this type based in Portugal, will preserve and will
provide microorganisms (half a million of different bacteria, fungi, yeasts,
viruses, unicellular algae) to the research community and companies in the
bioeconomics sector. It will also serve as an access and association portal for
the various European collections and repositories of biological resources".
The proposal was
developed by Nelson Lima, director of UMinho's Micoteca, and Rosa Aznar,
director of the Spanish Type Culture Collection of the University of Valencia,
with the support of the Foundation for Science and Technology of the Ministry
of Science, Technology and Higher Education of Portugal, as well as of the State
Secretariat for Research, Development and Innovation, of the Spanish Ministry
of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness. After the preparatory stage, financed
by the FP7 framework program with a budget of more than EUR 3 million, MIRRI
enters its consolidation phase. The process of formalizing the MIRRI-European
Research Infrastructure Consortium is scheduled for September, bearing in mind
the constitution of MIRRI as a legal entity recognized by the European
Commission until the end of 2019.
"The co-location at the University of Minho of the Pan-European
headquarters of the MIRRI is the culmination of a dedicated job of preparing of
application by Professor Nelson Lima, head of the Applied Mycology group at the
Centre of Biological Engineering" congratulate Eugénio Campos Ferreira.
