ULIXES, unravelling and exploiting Mediterranean Sea microbial diversity and ecology for xenobiotics’ and pollutants’ clean up

摘要: The civilizations in the Mediterranean Sea have deeply changed local environment, especially with extraction of subsurface oil and gas, their refinery transportation. Major environmental impacts are affecting all sides basin actual potential natural socio-economic problems. Events like recent BP’s disaster Gulf Mexico would a tremendous impact on close Sea. recently EU-funded project ULIXES (http://www.ulixes.unimi.it/) aims to unravel, categorize, catalogue, exploit manage microbial diversity available for addressing bioremediation polluted marine sites. rationale is based multiple diverse niches huge range microorganisms inhabiting therein. Microbial consortia ecology, components or products used designing novel pollutant- site-tailored approaches. exploits resource mining by isolation as well advanced ‘meta-omics’ technologies solving pollution three major high priority pollutant classes, petroleum hydrocarbons, chlorinated compounds heavy metals. A network twelve European Southern partners exploring ecology associated large set matrices including seashore sands, lagoons, harbors deep-sea sediments, tanker shipwreck sites, coastal deep sea sites where hydrocarbon seepages occur. mined collections exploited developing processes be tested ex situ field trials.