A federal state budgetary scientific institution of Murmansk Marine Biological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (MMBI RAS) is the oldest institution of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the North of Russia. Since 1935 the Institute has been pursuing comprehensive research of northern seas consistently expanding the geography of its activities from Dalnie Zelentsy Bay (Kola Peninsula coast) to the Greenland Sea in the west and the Laptev Sea in the east. In 1996 the Institute has included the southern seas of Russia into the scope of its interests, and since then both the Barents Sea and the Sea of Azov have always been the focus of MMBI research activities.