A geopolitical-economy of distant water fisheries access arrangements

In recent decades, fishing fleets and effort have grown in aggregate throughout the waters of lower-income coastal countries, much of which is carried out by vessels registered in higher-income countries. Fisheries access arrangements (FAAs) underpin this key trend in ocean fisheries and have their origins in UNCLOS’s promise to establish resource ownership as a mechanism to increase benefits to newly independent coastal and island states. Coastal states use FAAs to permit a foreign state, firm, or industry association to fish within its waters. This paper provides a conceptual approach for understanding FAAs across the global ocean and for exploring their potential to deliver on the promise of UNCLOS. Illustrated with the findings from multiple case studies, we advance understanding of FAAs by developing a geopolitical-economy of access that attends to the combination of contingent and context-specific economic, ecologic, and geopolitical forces that shape the terms, conditions and practices of the FAAs shaping this persistent phenomenon of higher-income industrial fleets fishing throughout lower-income countries’ waters

Genomics of Aspergillus oryzae: Learning from the History of Koji Mold and Exploration of Its Future

At a time when the notion of microorganisms did not exist, our ancestors empirically established methods for the production of various fermentation foods: miso (bean curd seasoning) and shoyu (soy sauce), both of which have been widely used and are essential for Japanese cooking, and sake, a magical alcoholic drink consumed at a variety of ritual occasions, are typical examples. A filamentous fungus, Aspergillus oryzae, is the key organism in the production of all these traditional foods, and its solid-state cultivation (SSC) has been confirmed to be the secret for the high productivity of secretory hydrolases vital for the fermentation process. Indeed, our genome comparison and transcriptome analysis uncovered mechanisms for effective degradation of raw materials in SSC: the extracellular hydrolase genes that have been found only in the A. oryzae genome but not in A. fumigatus are highly induced during SSC but not in liquid cultivation. Also, the temperature reduction process empirically adopted in the traditional soy-sauce fermentation processes has been found to be important to keep strong expression of the A. oryzae-specific extracellular hydrolases. One of the prominent potentials of A. oryzae is that it has been successfully applied to effective degradation of biodegradable plastic. Both cutinase, responsible for the degradation of plastic, and hydrophobin, which recruits cutinase on the hydrophobic surface to enhance degradation, have been discovered in A. oryzae. Genomic analysis in concert with traditional knowledge and technology will continue to be powerful tools in the future exploration of A. oryzae