New facilities enable scientists and students to answer key questions around sustainable food production

��Ƶ

New facilities enable scientists and students to answer key questions around sustainable food production

The Marie Lebour Marine Biology Research Facility is named after a pioneering scientist who spent much of her working life in Plymouth

Mr Alan Williams

Media and Communications Manager

Corporate Communications (Marketing and Communications)

21 August 2025

The ��Ƶ has created a state-of-the-art aquatic laboratory that will transform its research and teaching in sustainable aquaculture and marine food production.

The Marie Lebour Marine Biology Research Facility has been named after a pioneering marine biologist who spent much of her working life in Plymouth.

Located on the University’s city centre campus, it is home to facilities operating with flexible capabilities to replicate temperate to tropical conditions, freshwater to full strength marine water, and full lighting control, enabling precise studies across four distinct laboratory spaces.

These include a tailored Coral Spawning Laboratory equipped with a thermal stress system, intertidal simulation chambers, flow through systems, RAS systems, shrimp aquaculture systems, and advanced imaging for embryo development.

The new facility will be accessible to scientists from across the School of Biological and Marine Sciences , in addition to undergraduate and postgraduate students on a range of courses and research programmes.

All of this will enable the University to both continue, and expand on, its world-leading research and teaching on sustainable marine production systems.

The Marie Lebour facility is one of several cutting-edge spaces created on the University’s city centre campus and at its Brixham Laboratory , as part of an investment of more than £1.2million in new aquaria.

In addition, a new eDNA and Metabarcoding facility has been established, with platforms enabling flexible, cost-effective sequencing to support high-resolution biodiversity assessment and molecular diagnostics across marine, freshwater and terrestrial environments.

The new facilities have been made possible through the Centre of Research excellence in Intelligent and Sustainable Productive Systems (CRISPS), an initiative supported by a £5.7million investment from Research England that is working towards addressing the challenge of sustainably feeding a global population of 9 billion.

The investment in our new aquarium systems represents a major step forward in our capacity to conduct innovative and scalable research in aquaculture health and nutrition.

These facilities enable precise, controlled experimentation across a range of species and conditions, accelerating the development of sustainable solutions for global food security. Coupled with our new sequencing laboratory, we now have unparalleled capabilities to explore host–microbiome interactions at a molecular level, unlocking new insights into health, disease and environmental resilience of aquatic animals.

Professor Daniel Merrifield
Professor of Aquaculture Health and Nutrition

The eDNA and Metabarcoding Facility dramatically increases our ability to assess and quantify biodiversity from environmental samples as well as detect pathogens and diseases of interest.

With in-house capability, we are now able to innovate and expand the range of organisms and environments we can monitor from fresh and salt water to soils and air. It also enables us to develop more cost-effective protocols, and opens up DNA monitoring technology to new sectors and customers, particularly within sustainable food production.

Dr Jennifer Rowntree
Associate Professor in Ecological Genetics

Marie Lebour – pioneer of plankton science

Marie Lebour is one of the most celebrated female scientists of the 20th century. Born in Northumberland in 1876, she came to Plymouth in 1915 when she became a researcher at the Marine Biological Association. She worked there full-time for more than three decades, continuing her research in various forms until the mid-1960s.

She completed studies into the life cycles of marine species, but is perhaps best known for her work on the planktonic larval stages of decapods as well as studies exploring the early life stages of molluscs, sprat, herring and pilchards. She published more than 175 academic studies during her career, discovered almost 30 new species, and developed innovative new techniques to observe and study the larval stages of plankton and other species in the laboratory and on research cruises.