The BRAIN Engineered Cas (BEC) gene-editing tool will be applied to one of the libraries of marine organisms to search for ways to make compounds more sustainable and cost effective, under a research collaboration announced by Germany's BRAIN Biotech and the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS). The collaborators will initially focus on marine sources of omega-3 fatty acids, and believe the alignment of their various skills will enable the development of approaches that will be more environmentally sustainable, and have applications for the nutritional, pharmaceutical and cosmetic sectors. One of the main aims of the research strategy is to look for new and more efficient ways to express existing marine compounds, without actually altering their genetic structure. BRAIN Biotech AG, a publicly-listed company based in Germany, will licence its proprietary genome editing technology BEC to SAMS, which is based in Oban, Scotland, where its marine and freshwater organism library (Culture Collection of Algae and Protozoa) - one of the - holds some 3,000 different algae strains. The research license will allow SAMS to activate, adapt and optimize the BEC technology for the various marine-based compounds. Under the agreement, any future commercial applications will then be explored by Adam Kelliher, a life science entrepreneur who has founded and sold two companies in the omega-3 field, the most recent being based in the Western Isles of Scotland.