Description

Marine organisms produce a vast diversity of primary and secondary metabolites with antibacterial, antifungal, anticancer, analgesic, anti-inflammatory, nutritional, photoprotective activity or other
beneficial properties. The exploitation of marine bioresources and the valorisation of their natural products are encompassed by the burgeoning field of marine biotechnology, which is a high priority for the successful implementation of Blue Growth and Bioeconomy strategies within the EU. Marine biotechnology contributes to achieving 14 out of 17 UN sustainable development goals.
While the demand for alternative sources of food, drugs and chemicals is increasing, the sea and its vast biota remain largely underexplored and unexploited. Despite the short history marine organisms delivered close to 30.000 natural products, many more awaiting to be discovered.
This implies a strong need for enhanced transdisciplinary collaborations within scientific fields and multisectoral collaboration where citizens, researchers, policy makers, industrial and societal actors can
work together.
The overall aim of Ocean4Biotech is to bring together experts in the field of marine biotechnology, to provide a platform for sharing experience, knowledge and technologies, and to
design a roadmap for a more efficient and rapid development of marine biotechnology research in Europe and beyond. To best of our knowledge, such a large, diverse and geographically dispersed network of
experts in marine biotechnology does not exist. Since marine biotechnology is still in its infancy, we believe this is the optimal timing to create this efficient, operational, motivated, inclusive and sustainable network with a serious and ambitious commitment for proactive dissemination and science communication activities.

Principal Investigator (PI)

Ana Rotter, NIB – National Institute Biology, Slovenia

NOVA’s PI: Susana Pereira Gaudêncio, UCIBIO – FCT NOVA
UAlg’s PI: Leonor Cancela, CCMar – University of Algarve

Type of Collaboration: NOVA-UAlg

Description

The project is based on genomic and metabolomic approaches and the main goals are: the authenticity of extra virgin olive oils, considering geographic and varietal aspect, and the genuineness
of the product to yield a useful tool for screening for fraud and for the olive oil certification.

Principal Investigator (PI)

Maria João Cabrita, University of Évora.

Partners: ICAAM, HERCULES, CQE (University of Évora), REQUIMTE (NOVA.ID.FCT) and INIAV.

Description

The STRATEGY CCUS project aims to elaborate strategic plans for CCUS development in Southern and Eastern Europe at short term (up to 3 years), medium term (3-10 years) and long term (more than 10
years). Specific objectives are to develop:
• Local CCUS development plans, with local business models, within promising start-up regions;
• Connection plans with transport corridors between local CCUS clusters, and with the North Sea infrastructure, in order to improve performance and reduce costs, thus contributing to build
a Europe-wide CCUS infrastructure.

As recommended by the SET Plan Action 9, the STRATEGY CCUS project will study options for CCUS clusters in Eastern and Southern Europe, as at present the CCUS clusters being progressed are concentrated in Western Europe around the North Sea. Therefore, the project is timely for the strategic planning for CCUS development in the whole of Europe.
Strategic planning will consider 8 promising regions, within 7 countries (ES, FR, GR, HR, PO, PT, RO) representing 45% of the European CO2 emissions from the industry and energy sectors. These regions satisfy CCUS relevant criteria: presence of an industrial cluster, possibilities for CO2 storage and/or utilization, potential for coupling with hydrogen production and use, existing studies, and political will.
The methodology starts with a detailed mapping of CCUS technical potential of the regions together with a comprehensive mapping of local stakeholders and a process for their engagement. This will
pave the ground for CCUS deployment scenarios including assessment of ‘bankable’ storage capacity, economic and environmental evaluation.
The project strength relies on of a highly skilled consortium with experience on the whole CCUS chain as well as key transverse skills. CCUS development plans will be elaborated in close cooperation
with stakeholders, through the Regional Stakeholder Committees and the Industry Club, to ensure plans can be implemented, i.e. socially acceptable.

Principal Investigator (PI)

Fernanda de Mesquita Lobo Veloso, BRGM – Bureau de Recherches Geologiques et Minieres

NOVA’s PI: Patrícia Fortes, CENSE – FCT NOVA
UÉvora’s PI: Júlio Ferreira Carneiro, University of Évora

Type of Collaboration: NOVA-UÉvora

Description

EOSC-Life brings together the 13 Biological and Medical ESFRI research infrastructures (BMS RIs) to create an open collaborative space for digital biology.
It is our joint response to the challenge of analysing and reusing the prodigious amounts of data produced by life-science.
Managing and integrating this data is beyond the capabilities of most individual end-users and institutes. By publishing data and tools in a Europe-wide cloud EOSC-Life aims to bring the capabilities of
big science projects to the wider research community. Federated user access (AAI) will allow transnational resource access and authorisation.

EOSC-Life establishes a novel access model for the BMS RI: through EOSC scientists would gain direct access to FAIR data and tools in a cloud environment available throughout the European Research Area.
EOSC-Life will make BMS RIs data resources FAIR and publish them in the EOSC following guidelines and standards (e.g. EDMI). Overall this will drive the evolution of the RI repository infrastructure
for EOSC and integration of the BMS RI repositories. EOSC-Life will implement workflows that cross disciplines and RI boundaries and address the needs of interdisciplinary science. Through open hackathons and bring-your-own data events we will co-create EOSC-Life with our user communities, providinga blueprint for how the EOSC supports wide-spread and excellent data-driven life science research. EOSC-Life will address the data policies needed for human research data under GDPR. Interoperable provenance information describe history of sample and data to ensure reproducibility and adherence to regulatory
requirements.
The goal of the EOSC-Life project is to make sure that life-scientists can find, access and integrate life-science data for analysis and reuse in academic and industrial research. EOSC-Life will transform European life-science by providing an open, continent-scale, collaborative and interdisciplinary environment for data science.

Principal Investigator (PI)

Rupert Lueck, European Molecular Biology Laboratory

NOVA’s PI: Emília Monteiro, NOVA Medical School
UAlg’s PI: Adelino Canário; Ana Margarida
Amaral, CCMar – University of Algarve

Type of Collaboration: NOVA-UAlg

Description

Economic inequalities, social exclusion, discrimination against minorities, cultural resistance and disruption of social cohesion – these are all key concerns in the current European and global agenda, both in scholarly work and policy-making. RESISTANCE aims to analyse these issues by focusing on the processes of resistance carried out by social actors that have been historically disadvantaged, discriminated against and dominated.
By using a concept of resistance that connects continued and less visible forms of resistance, cultural dissent and violent revolts, the ultimate goal of RESISTANCE is to produce a reinterpretation of the
universe of “the dominated”. RESISTANCE will provide an understanding of how these actors could influence processes of social change, either by opening up societies to diversity and making them
more inclusive and equal, or, conversely, by causing the increase of repression.
Rooted in the disciplinary field of history, RESISTANCE uses the past as a laboratory for the analysis. Focusing on the former Portuguese and Spanish empires, this project privileges a comparative approach
in time and space in order to investigate an extended timeframe (sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries) and a spatial framework that encompasses Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia.
The past experiences of their societies, strongly grounded on ethnic, social, economic, cultural, religious, and gender inequality, still shape current political and social dynamics.
RESISTANCE is led by the University of Évora, and made up of seven beneficiary universities in Portugal, Spain and Germany, plus six universities in third countries (Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Cape Verde,
Mexico and USA).

Principal Investigator (PI)

Mafalda Soares da Cunha, University of Évora (CIDEHUS)

NOVA’s PI: Pedro Cardim, CHAM – NOVA FCSH

Type of Collaboration: NOVA-UÉvora

Description

The PIC is an instrument that, by using clinical information and evidence, facilitates personalized, integrated planning and guarantees the continuity of care, providing the patient and caregiver with
informed decisions. Thus, it will be possible to promote literacy, functional status, self-care, effectiveness, quality of life and medication safety, and reduce the use of health services, hospital admissions,
and mortality of patients with COVID-19 at home.
ENSP-NOVA is a partner in the project led by the University of Évora, as well as the Centro Hospitalar Lisboa Norte, EPE, DECSIS – Sistemas de Informação, SA, the Hospital do Espírito Santo (Évora), the NOVA Medical School and the Comprehensive Health Research Center (CHRC).

Principal Investigator (PI)

Manuel José Lopes, University of Évora, CHRC – Comprehensive Health Research Centre

NOVA’s PI: ENSP

Type of Collaboration: UÉvora-NOVA

Description

MedOOmics (Mediterranean Extra Virgin Olive Oil Omics: profiling and fingerprinting) aims to profile and fingerprint monovarietal extra virgin olive oils made of the most typical varieties from different regions of four countries, addressing issues related to varietal and geographical traceability and authentication. The objectives can be summarized as 1) the establishment of chemical markers of geographical and varietal traceability and 2) establish a pattern comprising the “markers of authenticity” to be used in the identification of olive oil adulterations. The novelty of MedOOmics is based on an integrated
approach, comprising a deep knowledge of some of the least studied olive oil varieties in the Mediterranean Basin. Altogether, this proposal will contribute to the implementation of a “MedOOmics database” comprising the chemical markers of varietal and geographical origin for the most relevant EVOOs from the Mediterranean countries encompassed in this work, which constitute a valuable tool in the
field of “Food Authentication”

Principal Investigator (PI)

Maria João Cabrita, University of Évora (ICAAM)

NOVA’s PI: Marco Gomes da Silva , NOVA.id.FCT/FCT-UNL

Type of Collaboration: UÉvora-NOVA

Description

Throughout the 12th and 13th centuries, the construction of the kingdom of Portugal saw the written contractualization of long-term legal relationships in the form of charters. Considering the
charters granted by the royal power, this project aims to reinterpret the nature of these documents (circumstances of granting and textual transmission) and their function in the broad framework
of the relationship between the councils and the royal administration. To this end, this project is based on a key idea: interdisciplinarity. History and Linguistics will provide research with its conceptual
and methodological tools; and Digital Humanities, the necessary instrumental tools to enhance results and make research and dissemination effective.
The main instrumental objective of the project is to constitute a corpus of Portuguese medieval charters, critically and electronically edited, for historical-linguistic reflection. To this end, we will develop innovative methodologies, based on semi-automatic tools for optimizing tasks, making the project results available in open access.
This project promotes the safeguarding of one of the oldest examples of written heritage of local powers, cities and the kingdom of Portugal, and with its memory, we prepare a better response to some
of the major goals of the United Nations for 2030, such as knowledge about justice, defense, equity, economic and ecological sustainability of peoples.

Principal Investigator (PI)

Filipa Roldão, University of Lisbon

NOVA’s PI: Adelaide Millán da Costa – Amélia Aguiar
Andrade – Maria João Branco, IEM – NOVA FCSH

UÉvora’s PI: Hermínia Vilar, University of Évora

Type of Collaboration: NOVA-UÉvora

Description

The project aims to study, in an interdisciplinary way, the liturgical codices that were part of the library of the Monastery of Lorvão, the first female Cistercian house in Portugal, contributing to the
integration of national monastic studies in gender studies, in the period between the beginnings of the 13th century and the end of the 16th century, in a corpus of about three dozen codices.
We intend to analyze this corpus, on the one hand, in material terms, that is, the characteristics of the codex from the illuminated decoration, pigments/paints and parchment used, to the binding materials and methods, including a survey of its conservation status and additions /changes suffered, contributing to the history of the book and conservation; on the other hand, in liturgical and content terms, characterizing its uses and types of circulation in the monastery, as well as the role of the nuns in ordering and in the formation/ conservation of this library. This interdisciplinary study will provide data
that can contribute to the raising of hypotheses regarding the characterization of the scriptorium or scriptoria of origin of the codices and their particularities, as well as realizing whether the liturgy practiced in Lorvão during the female period reveals identity traits and/ or submitted to Cistercian liturgical unanimity.

Principal Investigator (PI)

Catarina Fernandes Barreira, IEM – NOVA FCSH

UÉvora’s PI: Catarina de Sousa Cabral,
Laboratório HERCULES – University of Évora
Type of Collaboration: NOVA – UÉvora

Description

ExtremeOceans proposes that the understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying plasticity, adaptation and vulnerability of species subjected to ocean warming and heat waves can help us predict consequences beyond the narrow time-frame of climate change effects-oriented research. The main aim of ExtremeOceans is to unravel the genomic basis of adaptation and the role of epigenetics in phenotypic plasticity, describing the regulation of functional molecular networks and biological pathways of marine species under seasonal warming and heat wave events.

To tackle this challenge, our team will use a multi-layer Systems Biology approach to integrate several lines of evidence:

• variation in biomolecular profiles of wild intertidal fish populations across climate provinces and seasons in the Portuguese coast, determined by multi-omics analyses (transcriptomics, epigenomics and proteomics);

• assessment of individuals’ performance under heat wave scenarios in lab experiments, based on selected endpoints with physiological and ecological relevance;

• iii) macroevolutionary analyses of genes, proteins, molecular networks, physiological adaptations and ecological and functional traits using Bayesian modelling approaches.

Based on the critical understanding of physiological networks, their interactions and evolution, and how these determine key functional traits important for modifying tolerance limits in marine species, we will be able to ultimately screen the tree of life for heat vulnerable or tolerant species, providing information on dynamic interactions and radiation processes.

Principal Investigator (PI)

Sara Carolina Gusmão Coito Madeira, NOVA.ID.FCT

UAlg’s PI: Catarina Vinagre – Ester Serrão,
CCMar – University of Algarve
Type of Collaboration: NOVA-UAlg