Sponge ecobiology and biotechnology (SEB)

Our group conducts multidisciplinary research within the Natural Resources Area. We pursue developing an integrative view of functional ecology, built on a combination of approaches in cell biology, physiology, biogeochemistry, material science, bioconservation, biodiversity, and organismal evolution. This fundamental research is complemented with practical objectives. The latter ones involve plans for species conservation and sustainable use of habitats, investigations on exploitable biomaterials, and harnessing of the reproductive biology of the species to find new laboratory models for addressing a variety of questions in basic and applied sciences. Our work focus on both "in situ" and "lab" experimentation, involving both shallow-water and deep sea fauna of various marine invertebrates, but mostly marine sponges. This activity unfolds integrated into a dense network of international collaborators, essentially from diverse institutions in Europe, USA, Australia and Japan.