The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has signed an agreement with the National Prawn Company in Saudi Arabia for collaborative research relevant to the shrimp and prawn industry.

Joint projects will encompass research on waterborne diseases relevant to shrimp cultivation, studies of the impacts of long-term aquaculture and agriculture on the Red Sea, biotechnology, and environmental monitoring.

Scientists from KAUST’s Water Desalination and Reuse Center are working on new membranes which will be capable of partially desalinating seawater to produce brackish water. This will be used for brackish water agriculture to irrigate salt tolerant crops.

The Red Sea Research Center will look at the environmental impact of the large prawn aquaculture farms near the coast of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on marine ecology.

Finally, KAUST bioscientists will perform a genomics-driven project that will try to identify genes that produce favourable traits in shrimp aquacultures, such as resistance to diseases that are common in the Red Sea.

The prawn farm generates a unique resource of concentrated, high-saline and nutrient-rich wastewater, much of which flows back into the sea. “What interests me is how to capture nutrients from the waste water and use them to drive the growth of plants,” said Nina Fedoroff, a bioscientist at KAUST.

“I’m excited by the potential for field research on a scale much larger than would be possible at our campus alone,” she added.