Oceans and the Sustainable Development Goals: Co-Benefits, Climate Change & Social Equity

Achieving ocean sustainability is paramount for coastal communities and marine industries, yet is also inextricably linked to much broader global sustainable development—including increased resilience to climate change and improved social equity—as envisioned by the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This report highlights the co-benefits from achieving each SDG 14 target: progress towards each of the other 161 SDG targets when ocean targets are met, given ten-year lag times between ocean targets and other SDG targets. The identification of co-benefits is based on input from more than 30 scientific experts in the Nereus Program. Below we highlight notable co-benefits of achieving each target within SDG 14

Overfishing Trends and the Global Food Crisis

Fish are a vital source of nourishment, especially to people in the world's poorest nations. Widespread over?shing has led to a decline in catch globally; however, the links between over?shing and food security have not been well-understood. The authors of scientific article "Food security implications of globalmarine catch losses due to overfishing." assessed potential losses, globally and regionally, in ?sheries catch and revenue resulting from over?shing. They found a third to a half of commercial marine species had been over?shed during the past half-century, with billions in potential revenue lost. By placing country-level catch loss trends in the context of undernourishment levels in many of the world's poorest countries, the authors estimated that in 2000 the additional catch from sustainable ?shing could have helped 20 million people cover their food de?cit and avert undernourishment. This Pew Ocean Science Series report is a summary of the scientists' ?ndings

WSC-07: Evolving the Web Services Challenge

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an evolving architectural paradigm where businesses can expose their capabilities as modular, network-accessible software services. By decomposing capabilities into modular services, organizations can share their offerings at multiple levels of granularity while also creating unique access points for their peer organizations. The true impact of SOA will be realized when 3rd party organizations can obtain a variety of services, on-demand, and create higher-order composite business processes. The Web Services Challenge (WSC) is a forum where academic and industry researchers can share experiences of developing tools that automate the integration of web services. In the third year (i.e. WSC-07) of the Web Services Challenge, software platforms will address several new composition challenges. Requests and results will be transmitted within SOAP messages. In addition, semantic representations will be both represented in the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Finally, composite processes will have both sequential and concurrent branches

Bioengineering bacterial outer membrane vesicles as delivery system for RNA therapeutics targeted to lung epithelial cytosols

Intact epithelia lining the airways and alveoli in the lung are essential to maintain lung function. Structural or functional damage of epithelial cells leads in severe diseases, including COPD/emphysema, ibrosis or ALI/ARDS. This central role of epithelia in pulmonary diseases identifies these cells as primary candidates for targeted therapy. With the exception of surface-expressed molecules, however, targeting intracellular components is severely restricted due to poor delivery. We aim to overcome this obstacle using topically administered, bioengineered, biocompatible bacterial outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) as recombinant drug delivery systems for novel biopharmaceuticals. Engineering recombinant surface expression of eukaryotic receptor ligands in ClearColi®, a commercial E.coli BL21 (DE3) strain deficient in lipopolysaccharide production, we have used red fluorescent protein reporters to track OMV loading, transgene expression, and eukaryotic cell trafficking. We demonstrate statistically significant differences in the levels of over 700 proteins between differentially engineered and purified OMV preps with additional differences in transcriptome and lipidome consistency. We also characterised visual and particle size differences observed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA). Here we report early bioadhesion and culture of re-differentiated lung epithelia. This project aims to bridge the biotechnological gap in the intracellular biopharmaceutics drug delivery challenge for respiratory epithelia through highly controlled, and scalable bio-nanotechnology process. If successful, our work will unlock intracellular imaging and therapeutics research for respiratory diseases with a significant epithelial component, paving the way for other targeting ligands and potentially non-respiratory indications. cellular uptake results in A549 culture as well as air-liquid interface