Cursory: A set of COVID-related research grants worth £620,000 (USD $850,000) have just been awarded to the University of Aberdeen's School of Law and its research partners of Kobe University's Graduate School of Law and the British Institute for International and Comparative Law (BIICL). The funds from the Japanese Society for the Progression of Science (JSPS) and the UK Research Institute (UKRI) will award the University of Aberdeen and the British Institute for International and Comparative Law with £424,857.38 and Kobe University with JPY 29,980,000, accordingly. The grants run for three years, from December 2021 till December 2024. The funds are in support of the JSPS and UKRI recent call for 'Addressing COVID-19 Challenges with Japanese Researchers'. The research project proposes to examine how aspects of private law, commercial law, and intellectual property law might be reformed to better enable a rapid policy response in the face of an emerging pandemic. In particular, expertise from legal game theory, such as anticommons structures, will be used as an innovative legal research methodology. The research team includes legal scholars from the University of Aberdeen, BIICL, Kobe University, Hokkaido University, Nihon University, and Tokai University, making this one of the broadest UK-Japan legal research projects in recent history. In Depth: To solve new medical problems, such as viral outbreaks, many patents, copyrights, and other trade secrets need to be accessible to a variety of research labs in many countries. However, coordination problems in the markets surrounding medical and pharmaceutical intellectual property (IP) rights could prevent the rapid development of treatments, cures, and vaccines during the tightly packed timeframes of a moving pandemic. This situation can be described as an IP crisis. In addition, state regulations and policies to ensure safe research procedures and products often take years to complete. On the other hand, governmental interventions to IP rights may dis-incentivise private firms from investing in the necessary research in the future for the next potential pandemic. Thus, our research seeks to find solutions to the IP crisis that enable the continued functional trust of the market and of property rights during pandemics. This research will examine legal issues in various legal areas in such periods of crisis and will propose solutions, using recent innovations in anti-commons theory as theoretical foundations. Anti- commons is a phenomenon when a cluster of separate parties hold exclusionary rights over a joint or shared asset, then that asset might become unusable, resulting in a loss of value or production to the group as a whole. The phenomenon was initially identified in property law, but it can be found arising from many areas of substantive, procedural, and administrative law. This is potentially a central problem in medical research given the large numbers of researchers and research institutes involved. We will investigate intellectual property law, to identify how the rights to control the use of patents, trademarks, and copyrights might cause anti-common problems that can prevent the rapid development of medical and pharmaceutical solutions. In addition to this academic significance, this research will hope to find alternative modalities and designs of intellectual property law that might be more responsive to emergency events and prevent the emergence of anti-common problems. This project combines a wide set of legal expertise to address the problem. The research team unites global experts in Intellectual Property Law, Competition Law, Comparative Private and Commercial Law, Alternative Dispute Resolution, Public International Law, Public Law and Administrative Law, International Economic Law, Sociology of Law, Disaster Law, and Mathematical Methods of Law and Economics.

The outer layer of the earth is composed of rigid tectonic plates, like a cracked eggshell. These plates slide around the surface of the planet over a weaker, hotter layer below. The transition from rigid plate to the mantle below is fundamental to plate tectonics and our existence on the planet. However, the definition of the plate, i.e., their thickness, defining mechanism, and degree of coupling to the layer below are not well-known. I will use global seismic imaging to understand the thickness and defining mechanism of the Earth's oceanic plates. The ocean plates cover 70% of Earth's surface, yet are rarely mapped at high resolution given the remoteness, and the difficulty and cost of deploying seismometers to the bottom of a 4 km deep ocean. I have developed a new methodology to map the plates in locations where station coverage is sparse, as it is beneath the oceans. I use the SS waveform, which is an S wave that has bounced once at Earth's surface. Subtle variations in the character of the SS wave give information on the depth and character of the base of the tectonic plate in the region of the bouncepoint. I will use a newly compiled global database (1990 - 2011) which is nearly 4TB in size, and represents about four-times the data in my previous investigations. The significance is that I will be have nearly perfect resolution across all ocean basins, enabling global comparisons and a unified view of the tectonic plate. The definition of the plate has implications for many processes that impact human existence. It has a fundamental control on how plates move. This includes the generation of earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis. Therefore a better understanding will lead to better hazard assessment and mitigation of natural disasters. In addition, plate thickness and strength directly affects uplift and subsidence of the tectonic plate. These forces impact mountain building and sea level rise, and are therefore important factors in understanding climate change. The results from this study will change text books, and clarify fundamental questions. I will develop a better understanding of the definition of a tectonic plate, including its formation and evolution. Understanding the ocean plates is fundamental to any tectonic setting in that they likely play a large role in the formation of the continents. Overall, this work will deepen our understanding of plate tectonics.

One of the cornerstones of the 'Bioeconomy' will rest on our ability to exploit renewable carbon resources to produce environmental eco-friendly fuels and chemicals that will profitably replace those derived at present from fossil resources. The POLYDHB project is in frame with this endeavour. This project originality stands on previous works carried out by two partners of this proposal which have exploited synthetic biology toolbox combined to metabolic and enzymes engineering to construct a synthetic pathway that leads to the microbial production of a non-naturally metabolite 2,4-dihydroxybutyric acid (DHB) from renewable carbon sources (i.e. sugars). Initially conceived as a precursor for the synthesis of the methionine to target the field of animal nutrition, this molecule actually turns out to be a unique ‘green’ platform chemical for the production of other bio-based products with application in chemical and pharmaceutical industries. The purpose of the POLYDHB project is here to demonstrate that DHB can be used as an original non-natural monomer for the production of new bio-sourced and biodegradable polymers. The scientific and technical challenges of this project will be realized through three workpackages: (I) production of pure enantiomers and lactide /lactone derived from DHB, (II) development of a chemocatalytic process of (co)polymerisation of DHB and/or its lactone and lactide derivatives alone or with other monomers, and (III) conception of a microbial process for the synthesis of DHB-based polymers. In each of these workpackages, scientific risks have been identified and contingency solutions clearly proposed. To succeed in this objective, a multidisciplinary and complementary core of expert in the field of Systems and Synthetic Biology (LISBP, Toulouse), Polymer Chemistry (LCPO, Bordeaux) with the participation of a Japanese team expert in molecular biology of bio-sourced polymers has been set-up. Moreover, the strong commitment of the industrial partner Adisseo in this project is not solely justified by its indispensable position in mastering the chemical and microbial process for DHB production, but it is also an asset for the industrial exploitation of this molecule on markets other than nutrition animal that can be opened from the results obtained in this project. The ambition of POLYDHB project is to reach the technology readiness level of 4 within the 3 years period.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.