Access to biodiversity for food production: Reconciling open assess digital sequence information with access and benefit sharing - ScienceDirect

"Over the last forty years or so, a complex web of international legal agreements were developed that regulate the access, transfer, and use of plant genetic resources. These include the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Nagoya Protocol, and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources (Figure 1). In developing these legal regimes, policy makers struggled to balance a number of conflicting demands. These included ensuring that access providers share in the benefits that arise from the use of their genetic resources; that users who value-add to genetic resources can protect their innovations via intellectual property; and, at the same time, that scientists and breeders have ongoing access to genetic resources. While there are problems with the existing regimes, they have reached an uneasy compromise of sorts. In recent years, dramatic changes in the life sciences have threatened to undermine this complex and fragile balance (Unamba et al., 2015). These changes have been facilitated by new genomic technologies such as gene editing and synthetic biology (McDaniel and Weiss, 2005), by improved and cheaper sequencing technologies (Schaffer, 2007) which rapidly increased the availability of DNA sequence data, and advances in whole genome sequencing (Figure 1). Genomics is now a major source of data, rivalling big data disciplines like astronomy in the pace of data acquisition, storage, and analysis (Stephens et al., 2015). Open access international data repositories, such as GenBank, the DNA Databank of Japan, and European Molecular Biological Laboratory, that house a huge amount of DNA sequencerelated data (estimated at over 1.5 billion sequences) (WiLDSI , 2020) facilitate the sharing and use of digital sequence information (DSI) (Ad Hoc Technical Group on Digital Sequence Information 2015). The scientific value of public databases largely comes from the aggregation of data that allows scientists to identify patterns across the stored sequences (WiLDSI, 2020)...."