National Facility for Marine Cyanobacteria

NFMC has a building of its own with two floors having a built in area of over 7000 sq.feet and a separate electrical panel building with a generator to provide continuous power supply. The main building in addition to having laboratories, library, office, instrument rooms, store room etc., has a small modern auditorium for seminars. A mass cultivation facility for marine cyanobacteria with two large sumps to store sea water and eight cultivation tanks fitted with motors and pumps adjoining the Electrical panel building is available. The Mass Cultivation Facility has its own panel building with timers and switches.

The instrumental facilities keep on enlarging almost all the equipment needed for Physiology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology related work are available such as;

All  chemicals and glassware including disposable plastic wares are available. A number of computer systems with softwares including windows 95, laser printers etc., are also there. There is an E-mail Facility and a database is being created. A small library with all recent books and over a dozen journals is also available. Most of the rooms and laboratories are air-conditioned. NFMC has an air-conditioned mobile laboratory for field trips and transportation. Above all a conducive, calm and clean atmosphere to do research is the virtue of NFMC.

The research team is assisted by a team of dedicated supporting staff in administration as well as the laboratory. All the members of NFMC constitute an academic family that lives in harmony with science. The research activities of the facility are constantly monitored by an Executive Committee consisting of experts, funding agency representatives and local members under the chairmanship of Vice-Chancellor of the University.

Of the total shore line over 7,500 kms of India, the Facility has completed the survey of over 2,600 kms including west coast (Arabian Sea) from Cape Comerin to Goa, East Coast from Cape Comerin to Visakapatnam ( Bay of Bengal, Palk Bay, Palk Strait and Gulf of Mannar) and Andaman Islands. The survey covering open sea, stagnant sea water ponds and puddles, back waters and salt pans in these areas resulted in the identification of 199 species of 54 genera belonging to 14 families  in the Mainland and 111 species of 37 genera belonging to 13 families from the Andaman Islands representing the largest reported diversity of marine cyanobacteria from any country. The constantly expanding germplasm collection presently includes over 250 strains of marine cyanobacteria. The germplasm also includes some hypersaline strains.

Basic research with different strains in the germplasm has yielded fruitful results many of which are being turned into technologies for commercial exploitation. Notable achievements are the development of an aquaculture  feed, natural colourants and an industrial waste treatment and recycling process. A mass cultivation strategy for strains useful in these processes has also been developed. Several clues on the production of fine chemicals and enzymes such as b lactamase, protease, lipase etc., and also the usefulness of these organisms to treat effluents not usually amenable to conventional biological treatment have been obtained. There is promise to evolve a number of novel antibiotics and drugs to fight viral, fungal and bacterial pathogens as revealed by preliminary investigations. The leads available for biotechnological exploitation of marine cyanobacteria are so overwhelming through research over a short period of less than a decade, that it warrants a much bigger enthusiastic and committed group of researchers to fully exploit them.