Hazirik gabeko genomak: DSIaren aroan zientzia irekia eta justizia globala uztartuz

Abstract

The digitalization of biodiversity is profoundly transforming the way plant genetic resources are understood and managed. What for centuries circulated as physical seeds—preserved by farmers, exchanged in markets, or conserved in gene banks—is now shared as digital information: DNA sequences stored in international repositories. This “dematerialization” of biodiversity, driven by high-throughput sequencing, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, offers unprecedented opportunities to accelerate plant breeding and generate crops more resilient to climate change and environmental degradation, but it also raises profound legal, ethical and political dilemmas. The central issue lies in determining whether these sequences should be treated as open scientific information, circulating freely as part of the global commons of knowledge, or as economic objects subject to exclusive rights and access and benefit-sharing (ABS) mechanisms. Since 2016, negotiations within the framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have confronted diverging coalitions: countries and communities claiming fair compensation on one side, and sectors of science and industry warning against restrictions to open access on the other. The outcome, at COP15 (Montreal, 2022) and COP16 (Cali, 2024), was the design of a multilateral benefit-sharing mechanism that preserves open access while channeling redistribution through a global fund. This article examines the tension between open science and the commodification of digital sequence information (DSI), and explores how future governance of these data may shape the destiny of plant diversity: either towards shared sustainability and equity or towards new asymmetries of power in the digital era.