THE CEC BRIDGE LIPASE PROJECT

Abstract

The Commission of the European Community is implementing several priority actions specifically designed for improving the competitiveness of European Biotechnology. One of these actions aims at the establishment of a Community network for training and research and has been executed, since 1982, in the framework of three successive Community programmes BEP, BAP and BRIDGE. These activities are conducted via two different types of projects : N-projects and T-projects. The T-projects, larger targeted projects, are aiming at bottlenecks resulting from structural or scale. constraints. One of these, the T-project on "Characterisation of lipases for industrial applications : three-dimensional structure and catalytic mechanism"does go backto a successful transnational collaborative research effort on phospholipases in the Biotechnology Action Programme by groups in Marseille (F), Utrecht (NL) and Tübingen (FRG). The aim of the T-project should be to acquire so much new knowledge about a sufficient number of these enzymes that it will be possible to understand why they are lipases and how they function as such.