Digital sequence information (DSI) enables fair benefit-sharing, ensures open access to sequence data, strengthens biodiversity conservation and sustainable use, and leverages genomics and bioinformatics for international capacity-building.
Key highlights
- Sequence data, referred to as digital sequence information (DSI) in policy circles, are key to scientific advancement and technological innovation in fields as diverse as medicine, food security, green energy production, and biodiversity conservation.
- The vast potential of DSI was underscored during the pandemic when open access to the digital copy of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, uploaded by China, enabled researchers worldwide to develop vaccines against COVID-19 in record time.
- Negotiations on how to regulate the use of digital sequence information (DSI) of genetic resources could further delay the finalisation of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
- Developing countries which are rich in biodiversity feel DSI provides a loophole through which developed countries can circumvent CBD.
- DSI is currently not subject to access and benefit-sharing (ABS) regulations under UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its Nagoya Protocol.
- The CBD was established three decades ago to ensure that communities receive the benefits arising from the use of biodiversity.
- According to CBD, each country has sovereign rights over its genetic resources. Anyone who wants to access the material needs to first inform the country and set down mutually acceptable terms.
- The person or party must also ensure that benefits accrued from the use of the resource is shared with the country of origin so that communities and holders of knowledge too gain from the use of these resources in both monetary and non-monetary terms.
- But DSI is tricky to manage as the information can be used without movement of, or access to, physical specimens.
- For instance, US biotechnology company Regeneron has prepared a treatment for Ebola using DSI from West Africa it found in an open access database GenBank.
- At the latest Fourth meeting of the Open-ended Working Group on the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework in Nairobi, Kenya, held on June 21-26, parties from Africa clearly said a decision on benefit-sharing from DSIs is important.
- They suggested setting up a fund under a multilateral benefit-sharing mechanism, which collects one per cent of the retail price of all commercial income resulting from the utilisation of genetic resources, from traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources, or from DSIs.
- This fund, operated by the Global Environment Facility, could then be used to support conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and be made available to communities and countries in a competitive, project-based manner to support conservation of biological diversity and its sustainable use.
