Topics The "Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of Japan (PMAJ) Press Tour" Held Visit to the National Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, which promotes the development of deep-sea bio-resources through an open innovation system by widely providing resources such as deep-sea sediments, deep-sea microbial strains, and genetic information to private companies and other external organizations in Japan

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The FY2019 Pharmaceutical Cooperative Press Tour visited the Center for Bioscience and Biotechnology (Yokosuka City, Kanagawa Prefecture) of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) on December 18, 2019.JAMSTEC "supports the realization of Japan as a maritime nation through new science and technology, contributing to the sustainable development and maintenance of the people, human society, and the Earth. JAMSTEC's mission is to "contribute to the sustainable development and maintenance of the people, human society, and the Earth by supporting the realization of Japan as a maritime nation through new science and technology." JAMSTEC is taking on the following challenges: (1) integrated understanding and prediction of global environmental changes; (2) establishment of a unified picture of the Earth's internal dynamics and earthquake and tsunami disaster prevention research; (3) life evolution and marine terrestrial life history; and (4) new developments in resource research and marine geo-bioengineering. The content of this press tour, attended by nine reporters from general and trade newspapers and seven members of the Public Relations Committee of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of Japan, included an easy-to-understand lecture by Center Director Shigeru Deguchi on the activities of the Bioscience and Biotechnology Center, the core of JAMSTEC's Ocean Function Utilization Division, and a visit to the manned research submersible "Shinkai 6500. The tour also included a visit to the manned research submersible Shinkai 6500. The participants also covered the event from the perspective of the possible relationship between marine biological research and the pharmaceutical industry.

Lecture Scene

The Environment Surrounding Japan's Oceans

Japan ranks 61st in the world in terms of land area by country. However, when looking at the area of its territorial waters, it ranks 6th in the world, behind the major powers: the United States, France, Australia, Russia, and Canada.

The sea contains a variety of resources. For example, the 5500m seafloor around Minamitori Island contains large amounts of manganese nodules and is thought to contain the equivalent of 1,600 years of domestic consumption of the rare metal cobalt.

The Last Frontier of Space and the Deep Sea

For mankind, space and the sea are the final frontiers. In Japan, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) (space) and JAMSTEC (deep sea) are challenging this frontier. How will they reach the frontier? How many humans have reached the frontier?

Why have only three people reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench? 11 km is about the height of an international plane in the sky. The reason is that the deep sea is a very dangerous environment. Even a mere 10-meter dive raises the atmospheric pressure by one atmospheric pressure. At the deepest point of the Mariana Trench, the pressure is 1100 atmospheres. To reach such a dangerous environment, one must have the appropriate skills and experience. Currently, in addition to Japan, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, and Australia are among the countries that are conducting deep-sea research, all of which have large territorial waters.

Significance of manned deep-sea research

Why do you insist on manned submarine surveys? Although unmanned surveys using robotics and wireless technology have made remarkable progress, there are some limitations in the deep sea that are different from those on land, such as the inaccessibility of electromagnetic waves. Manned diving surveys are equally challenging, but researchers believe in "serendipity" (unexpected discoveries), as Nobel laureates often refer to it. The intuition gained from the deep-sea world seen through the Shinkai 6500's small window is invaluable. If we rely solely on completely unmanned research, the wellspring of intuition and ideas of researchers may wither away.

Extreme environment of the deep sea

Sunlight cannot reach the ocean deeper than 200 meters. Therefore, sunlight does not heat the seawater. The deep sea is a harsh environment with low temperatures (0-4°C) and high water pressure in a pitch-black darkness where no light can reach. In the deep sea, the presence of water pressure produces unique substances. An example is supercritical water. Water boils at about 90°C at the summit of Mt. Fuji, where the atmospheric pressure is low, and at about 73°C at the summit of Mt. Everest. Conversely, in an environment with 218 atmospheric pressure, the boiling point of water rises to 374°C. Water in this state is called "supercritical water" and is indistinguishable from water and water vapor. Normally, this substance does not exist in nature, but in the deep sea, a special environment of ultrahigh pressure, this supercritical water naturally exists on the ocean floor where hydrothermal vents exist due to the influence of magma (700-1200°C). In the supercritical state, water and oil mix freely. This property is used as nanotechnology (nanoemulsion) in functional foods and cosmetics.

Survival strategies in the deep sea

It may be hard to believe that living organisms could exist in such a harsh environment as the deep sea, but the survival strategies of living organisms are astonishing. When sampling deep-sea sediments, we detect a wide variety of microorganisms. For example, an absolute pressure-loving bacterium isolated from the bottom of the Mariana Trench cannot grow at pressures lower than the equivalent of 5,000 meters deep, but is most active at 800 atmospheres. There are also hyperthermophiles that multiply at 122°C. Life on the surface is overwhelmingly dependent on solar energy. In the deep sea, where sunlight does not reach, most of the seafloor is covered with sediments or is a desolate, rocky coastline, but deep-sea organisms are concentrated around hydrothermal vents that exist in undersea volcanoes. This ecosystem is supported by chemosynthetic microorganisms that synthesize organic matter using reductive substances such as hydrogen and hydrogen sulfide contained in hydrothermal fluids as an energy source. Hydrothermal vents form a rich flora, so to speak, like an oasis in the desert. Photosynthetic organic matter is also supplied to the deep sea by marine snow (plankton excrement, carcasses, etc.) that settles from the ocean surface, landslides on seafloor slopes caused by earthquakes, and the settling of dead bodies of large creatures such as whales, providing a valuable energy source for deep-sea organisms.

Learning from the Mechanisms of Deep-sea Organisms

Biotechnology (fermentation, cell fusion, genetic modification, cloning, etc.) has become a somewhat familiar term, but it is a technology that takes advantage of the action of living organisms. In contrast, in deep-sea organisms, biomimetics (biomimetics) is important to study the very mechanisms that deep-sea organisms employ to survive. For example, the chironomid, whose body is made of glass fiber, has the same structure as the optical fiber used in communication technology. To manufacture optical fiber, humans must process glass fibers at high temperatures, but the chiaroscuro forms a glass body at low temperatures. Also, each fiber is thinner than an optical fiber and more durable against bending. In a manner of speaking, we can say that optical fibers are naturally manufactured using an ultra energy-saving process, and we are researching whether we can elucidate this mechanism and somehow put it to practical use.

External Provision of Deep-sea Bio-Resources

Our society is shifting from a linear economy (one-way economic activities of extracting resources, manufacturing products, and disposing of them) to a circular economy (economic activities in which resources are circulated at each stage of production, consumption, and disposal, and no waste is produced). We are moving from an era in which we take things from the sea and dispose of them when they are no longer useful to an era in which we use information from the sea to create an environment in which resources can circulate sustainably. In this era, we believe that the unique survival strategies of deep-sea organisms and microorganisms will be a source of innovation for humankind.

Until now, deep-sea bioresources have been extremely difficult to obtain, and while their academic use has advanced, they have not been able to be made commercially valuable. For this reason, JAMSTEC has been expanding the scope of the search for useful microorganisms that has been conducted on land to the deep sea with the aim of developing all microbial resources on earth and returning them to society. We are now working to expand this framework and build a framework that directly links corporate ideas to the utilization of deep-sea bio-resources. Specifically, we established the Deep-sea Bio Open Innovation Platform in 2017, which is centered on open innovation, and have established a system that allows us to provide deep-sea bioresources (sediments, microorganisms, and genome information) to external organizations on a trial basis. Then, in February 2020, we started providing deep-sea bioresources to external institutions on a full-scale basis.

The purpose of this project is to encourage domestic companies and research institutions to actively utilize deep-sea bioresources owned by JAMSTEC, and the initial cost is kept low. Although JAMSTEC retains ownership of the resources it provides, the ownership of any modified materials obtained by the user through utilization of the resources belongs to the user. In principle, the intellectual property rights to the resources, byproducts, and modified products belong to the users in order to promote their active utilization. We have already provided bioresources to private companies, universities, and national research institutes on a trial basis, and we hope that JAMSTEC's activities will be widely known to the public and that more external organizations will make use of our deep-sea bioresources.

Tour of the Shinkai 6500

After the lecture, we visited the Shinkai 6500, the world's second deepest manned research submersible. The Shinkai 6500 can literally dive to a depth of 6500 meters, and its three-man crew conducts research activities on the seafloor. The area of activity includes not only the seas around Japan, but also the seafloors of the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans around the world.

Facility Tour

To ensure high reliability to withstand the harsh deep-sea environment repeatedly, the cockpit of the Shinkai 6500 is protected by a "pressure-resistant shell," a steel ball made of titanium alloy with an inner diameter of 2 meters. Unlike military submarines, the Shinkai 6500 is designed to float, and when diving, it carries a weight (ballast). The Shinkai 6500, which weighs approximately 26 tons on the surface, needs a buoyant material to maneuver freely off the seafloor in the ocean, which is made of tiny glass balls with a cavity of less than 100 microns solidified with epoxy resin. This buoyant material is tightly packed into the gaps and crevices of the Shinkai 6500.

Incidentally, a small vessel license is required to operate the Shinkai 6500.

Shinkai 6500 (full-scale model)

(Public Relations Committee, Policy and PR Subcommittee, Takahiro Kawakami )

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