Given the competitiveness among the super-majors to find and develop new oil and gas reservoirs around the world, and the billion-dollar cost of exploration programs, any proven enhancements in offshore exploration success will have an immediate economic return. This project focuses on de-risking exploration and development in offshore Nova Scotia by the validation and integration of new genomics-based technologies with traditional exploration approaches. Promising bioassay strategies currently being developed will undergo rigorous validation testing towards commercial readiness, and new bioassay strategies based on state-of-the-art lipidomics and metabolomics will be developed. The main deliverable for the project will be integration of different omics data layers with geochemistry and other geoscience into an easily accessible and marketable database for mapping target sites to enumerate the existence and type of reservoir leakage at prospective target sites.