The need for the UK to shift to NetZero was highlighted at COP26 in Glasgow, and there is a clear need for UK energy security. UK policy to achieving these is based on massive expansion of off-shore wind. In 2022 Crown Estate Scotland "ScotWind" auctioned 9,000 km2 of sea space in the northern North Sea, with potential to provide almost 25 GW of offshore wind. Further developments are planned elsewhere, for example, the 300 MW Gwynt Glas Offshore Wind Farm in the Celtic Sea. These developments mark a shift in off-shore wind generation, away from shallow, well mixed coastal waters to deeper, seasonally stratified shelf seas This shift offers both challenges and opportunities which this proposal will explore. Large areas of the NW European shelf undergo seasonal thermal stratification. This annual development of a thermocline, separating warm surface water from cold deep water, is fundamental to biological productivity. Spring stratification drives a bloom of growth of the microscopic phytoplankton that are the base of marine food chains. During summer the surface layer is denuded of nutrients and primary production continues in a layer inside the thermocline, where weak turbulent mixing supplies nutrients from the deeper water and mixes oxygen and organic material downward. Tidal flows generate turbulence; the strength of turbulence controls the timing of the spring bloom, mixing at the thermocline, and the timing of remixing of the water in autumn/winter. Determining the interplay between mixing and stratification is fundamental to understanding how shelf sea biological production is supported. Arrays of large, floating wind turbines are now being deployed over large areas of seasonally-stratifying seas. These structures will inject extra turbulence into the water, as tidal flows move through and past them. This extra turbulence will alter the balance between mixing and stratification: spring stratification and the bloom could occur later, biological growth inside the thermocline could be increased, and more oxygen could be supplied into the deep water. There could be significant benefits of this extra mixing, but we need to understand the whole suite of effects caused by this mixing to aid large-scale roll-out of deep-water renewable energy. eSWEETS will conduct observations at an existing floating wind farm in the NW North Sea to determine how the extra mixing generated by tides passing through the farm affect the physics, biology and chemistry of the water. We will measure the mixing of nutrients, organic material and oxygen within the farm, and track the down-stream impacts of the mixing as the water moves away from the wind farm and the phytoplankton respond to the new supply of nutrients. We will use autonomous gliders to observe the up-stream and down-stream contrasts in stratification and biology all the way through the stratified part of the year. We will use our observations to formulate the extra mixing in a computer model of the NW European shelf, so that we can then use the model to predict how planned renewable energy developments over the next decades might affect our shelf seas and how those effects might help counter some of the changes we expect in a warming climate. Stratification is so fundamental to how our seas support biological production that we will develop a new, cost-effective way of monitoring it. We will work with the renewables industry and modellers at the UK Met Office on a technique that allows temperature measurements to be made along the power cables that lie on the seabed between wind farms and the coast. Our vision is that large-scale roll-out of windfarms will lead to the ability to measure stratification across the entire shelf. This monitoring will help the industry (knowledge of operating conditions), government regulators (environment responses to climate change) and to operational scientists at the UK Met Office (constraining models for better predictions).

Phytoplankton form the base of the marine food chain. Most phytoplankton are benign and indeed positively benefitial to the health of the environment. However, a minority of phytoplantkon are harmful to humans, the environment or the economy as a result of their prouction of toxic substances. These phytoplankton are often called harmful algal blooms or HABs. Toxic phytoplankton may be ingested by filter feeding shellfish that are not themselves harmed but which accumulate and concentrate the toxin in their tissue. If the shellfish are them eaten by humans potentially serious illness may occur. Monitoring programs of phytoplankton and shellfish flesh act as a means of minimising the heath risk to humans of shellfish consumption. Hwever, through factors that are not fully understood harmful phytoplankton and their toxins are perceived to be on the increase in UK waters. Hence, it is necessary to better understand to factors that influence toxin production its vectoring by shellfish and the public health implications of shellfish toxicity. Research in this field in the UK is relatively underdeveloped and fragmented with little or no colllaboration between environmental and biomedical scientists. In this proposal we intend to hold a research workshop to integrate scientists, regulators, monitoring agencies and industry representatives with expertise in hamful phytoplankton and their effects. The worshop will allow the interdisciplinary sharing of knowledge and ideas and allow the hypothesis to be formulated for future environmental/biomedical colloborative projects. The production of a report will allow us to disseminate more widely the knowledge gained during the project.

Building on a number of recent UK- and internationally funded initiatives, MSPACE is a highly integrated, multidisciplinary project conceptualised to drive forward the capability of the four UK nations in designing and implementing climate-smart marine spatial plans (MSP). This is a global ambition, as well one specific to the UK . MSPACE is underpinned by a vast catalogue of state-of-the-art marine climate change modelling projections for the environment, species and habitats, uniquely available to the consortium through existing expertise and partnerships, along with world leading modelling spatial meta-analysis methods. In MSPACE, we will use these methods, already tested in real life MSP development, and build on key partnerships with the UK policy and industry communities. By month 18 MSPACE will deliver a report on the vulnerabilities and opportunities that climate change presents to the near-term spatial management of the fisheries, aquaculture and marine conservation sectors across the UK Exclusive Economic Zone. This report will be delivered in liaison with the Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership (MCCIP) utilizing the latest MCCIP models for rapid delivery of evidence to support policy. Four carefully considered, contrasting real-life MSPs across the four nations of the UK will be used as case-studies throughout, enabling the application of the MSPACE tools to the complex and diverse national planning landscape. A detailed assessment of the needs and values of the planning stakeholder pools across the UK nations is also delivered early in MSPACE, and guides how climate change modelling analyses will be communicated through the project's planned stakeholder engagement activities, including economic scenario exploration and analyses. These products will feed into the main and final output of MSPACE: sets of case-study specific recommendations for the design of climate smart, economically viable and socially acceptable strategies that support sustainable co-uses of the marine environment, marine conservation, natural capital preservation and resource exploitation. Co-development of the recommendations, using surveys, multiple-criteria decision analyses and others methods with our case-study specific stakeholder pools, ensures they are relevant and responsive to the current and future priorities and needs of the regions covered by each plan, its stakeholders and governance structures. Lessons learnt from each case study will therefore be directly applicable to other MSPs in the same nation due to their specific tailoring. Significant potential for application of the overall lessons learned in MSPACE to the broader UK planning landscape, including MSPs for overseas territories, is ensured through the diversity of UK planning contexts explored in the project, and the consortium's strong links to key marine industries and marine planning communities. We have capitalised on these links since the conceptualisation of the project, and we will build on them through project delivery.

Animals are commonly used in biological sciences for both fundamental and applied research. With the growth of the fish farming industry, more and more studies are carried out to understand how disease affects fish in order to find ways to combat them and protect fish welfare. To gain understanding on how a virus can transmit disease, or how pathogenic it is for the fish experiments are often carried out where a group of fish is experimentally infected in a special containment aquarium facility and the effects monitored. It is sometimes necessary to carry out experiments with fish (in vivo experiments) to answer certain questions but often valuable information can be obtained by performing the experiments instead on immortal fish cells (in vitro experiments). These are cells which divide and grow indefinitely on plastic dishes in a synthetic culture medium containing nutrients and give rise to a cell line, an indefinite source of biological material. The cells divide outwards from a few initial cells to form a layer on the surface of the dish. The cell lines are usually composed on one cell type, e.g. a kidney cell, heart cell or kidney cell. Cell lines can be used to test whether a tissue sample taken from a dead fish contains a virus or not (diagnosing disease), or whether the fish cell can make products to combat the virus (anti-viral response). When the virus is added to the fish cells, it infects the cells and kills them and this forms gaps in the cell layer which are easily seen (cytopathic effect). Unfortunately, there are many strains of viruses responsible for serious diseases that do not grow very well in the fish cell lines currently available. In addition in fish there is no possibility to control what type of cell will generate a cell line. This is because even if you start with a sample of heart or kidney or gill tissue, these tissues are made up of several cell types and to date, in fish, cell lines are generated "by luck", that is, one of the cell types in the tissue may start to divide and continue to do so, but it may not be the cell type which the virus normally infects. In fact, it is difficult to allocate some of the currently available cell lines to a certain fish tissue. The present project aims to find new methods to produce fish cell lines from targeted cell types. Cells dissociated from fish organs can be genetically modified to undergo a permanent cell division and survive in synthetic culture medium. These cells would propagate indefinitely and can be used to replace animal experiments by in vitro ones. Several strategies will be tested alone or in combination: immortalisation of cells by factors which have been found to induce cancer cells to divide and grow, by growth factor, by factors which inhibit cell death, by factors produced by parasites known to trigger the proliferation of blood cells. Genetic systems which can produce these factors will be introduced into the initial cells isolated from different tissue types, and the factors will act on the cell to keep it dividing and/or prevent it from dying. The ultimate aim is to reduce the number of live fish needed to investigate and diagnose fish disease and to provide tools for use in improving fish health and welfare. With increasing pressure on wild fish stocks and an increasing world population, aquaculture has become an important provider of protein for many communities and will most likely continue to grow.

Fish farming in the UK and around the world faces serious economical threats from viruses and bacteria causing outbreaks and loss of valuable livestock. Vaccines and immunostimulants are often administered to fish to prevent these outbreaks. Continuous research is required to verify whether new products are effective. In order to do so, research worldwide is routinely carried out whereby large groups of animals are experimentally infected with a pathogen. The level of mortalities in groups of fish treated with such substances are then compared with a group of untreated fish. Other researchers have focused on understanding how the fish immune system works and how it combats invasion by bacteria and viruses. For this, experiments are undertaken whereby a group of fish is experimentally infected with viral or bacterial pathogens, then at regular intervals, at least 5 fish are killed and analysed. Both methods are very costly in terms of the number of animals used, and we propose to reduce this from the work carried out during this 2 year project. Instead of killing fish at regular intervals, we propose to take small volumes of blood repeatedly during the course of the infection without harming the fish. The number of animals required for this experiment design represents only 20 % of the number of fish required using traditional sampling methods. In addition, following the same fish during the course of the infection will allow a better understanding of the immune response elicited by the fish, and the outcome of this response i.e. death or survival. Part of the project will be dedicated to improving the analysis method. Because only a small volume of blood is repeatedly sampled over the course of the infection, novel methods are required to measure and describe the immune response. Some of the tools to be includes are antibodies, specifically recognise individual immune molecules, information on fish immune genes and the existence of immortal fish cells that can be cultivated in vitro. These methods will be adapted for use with the small volumes of blood collected and will be used to understand which blood cells, and serum molecules are important in combating the pathogen. The relation between the cell types, the molecules involved, the type of pathogen and the final outcome of the infection will be very important in predicting the severity of infection, determining the appropriate immunostimulant to be used and improving existing fish vaccines.