The University of Plymouth has created a state-of-the-art aquatic laboratory. 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 center 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 programs. All of this will enable the University to both continue and expand on its 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 center 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,” said Daniel Merrifield, Professor of Aquaculture Health and Nutrition.
