Bioactives: about us Bioactives: About Us  The M&FMB programme funded several projects designed to investigate the range of microorganisms found in marine and freshwater environments and their potential for yielding products and processes of commercial interest. Further information on each of these projects is available here. This research confirmed that, in terms of the range of microorganisms found and their genetic diversity, the deep ocean is more akin to a rainforest than a desert.  And from this taxonomic and genetic diversity comes functional and biochemical diversity, which can potentially be exploited for biotechnological application.  A judicious combination of molecular techniques, novel culturing strategies, intelligent screening approaches and bioinformatics can be used to reveal novel biochemical activity cost-effectively.  We believe such bioprospecting approaches should be of great interest to pharmaceutical and biotechnology businesses as well as to academic researchers in a number of different fields.