Marbio – an analytical platform for marine natural products biodiscovery

We are a research group located far north in the Arctic, in Tromsø Norway. We specialise in marine natural products biodiscovery. For that we can rely on our multidisciplinary expertise in marine biology (focusing mostly on invertebrates, bacteria and fungi), natural product chemistry, cell biology and early drug discovery. We are working together with Marbank at the Norwegian institute of Marine Research .

We boast expertise in:

Screening complex mixtures (i.e. natural product extracts and fractions) for biological activity in biochemical and cell-based assays
Identification of known and novel bioactive compounds (dereplication) using high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry
Mass guided isolation of bioactive natural products from extracts and organisms
Structural elucidation of complex natural products using high resolution mass spectrometry, NMR, IR and UV-Vis spectroscopy.
Isolation and cultivation of marine microorganisms (bacteria and fungi), '
Genome mining to identify biosynthetic gene cluster
Working with samples of marine origin such as extracts from invertebrates, marine fungi and bacteria.

Our daily activities include preparing and screening fraction libraries from extracts provided by Marbank. These screening activities take place in our high throughput screening platform. The workflow in Marbio relies heavily on the automation of sample handling, preparation and analysis.The seamless integration of robust screening assays with early identification of known compounds and bioassay-guided purification of novel bioactive compound is how how work stands out.

Infrastructure

Some notable equipment that our team has access to:

Autopurification HPLC (for isolation of natural products)
High-resolution MS Waters Xevo MRT (dereplication)
Biomek NXp liquid handler
Envision Alphascreen multimode detector
two Tecan Spark multimode microplate reader
Q-Pix colony picker