Abstract

Digital Sequence Information (DSI) has quietly transformed how biological value is created, shared, and commercialised. As biotechnology increasingly relies on digital sequences rather than physical genetic resources, existing frameworks built around territorial control, access, and benefit-sharing are beginning to show their limits. This blog examines how DSI unsettles the foundations of biodiversity governance, complicates the relationship between open science and equity, and exposes a deeper shift from controlling biological materials to controlling biological information. More than a regulatory challenge, DSI reveals a changing innovation economy where value increasingly lies in informational abstractions.

Introduction

Imagine a researcher sequences a plant found only in the Western Ghats. The plant stays in India, but its DNA sequence goes online. A biotech firm downloads it, identifies commercial value, synthesises it in a lab, and files a patent. No material crossed borders. No permission was sought. No benefits were shared. What just happened? A biological resource was exploited yet the law didn’t even notice.

This is the Digital Sequence Information (DSI) problem in its simplest form. Biotechnology no longer creates value from samples collected in forests. In fact, it begins with data downloaded from servers. That makes DSI more than a regulatory problem, it reveals a deeper shift that biology has become information, while law still assumes it remains matter.

The DSI Conundrum

DSI broadly refers to digital information derived from genetic resources, including DNA and RNA sequences and related biological data. Yet there is still no internationally agreed definition. This reveals that biological information is fluid, making it difficult to draw legal boundaries.

What matters more is what DSI enables. Today, genomic data is used to develop medicines, engineer microbes, improve crops, and train AI systems. Platforms like Benson Hill’s CropOS generate value not from individual sequences, but from analysing vast amounts of genetic data together. Even mRNA vaccines are largely informational products: sequences computationally designed and later synthesised. Biotechnology has always valued the information encoded in DNA more than the organism itself. What DSI changes is scale. Biological information can now be extracted, stored, shared, and commercially deployed globally without ongoing physical interaction with the source. This is a categorical shift.

The CBD–Nagoya Framework

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) transformed how international law viewed genetic resources. Instead of treating them as humanity’s common heritage, it recognised sovereign rights over resources within national borders. Access could now be conditioned on consent and benefit-sharing. The Nagoya Protocol strengthened this framework by operationalising these principles. Together, they created a system of simple bargain: researchers seek access, negotiate terms, obtain permission, and share benefits. Physical access became the jurisdictional hook, and prior informed consent became the mechanism through which sovereignty operated.

Here is the problem with the framework. The entire CBD architecture assumes that biological value requires physical access to physical resources. That made sense in 1992 when genetic resources were understood primarily as material objects. DSI disrupts that assumption. Once sequence data is digitised and uploaded, it can be accessed globally without touching the original resource again. The sovereignty framework remains intact, but the activity it was designed to govern has moved somewhere else entirely.

What strikes me about this is not the failure of foresight, which is easy to condemn in retrospect. It is the structural impossibility of patching a material framework to cover an informational phenomenon.

Open Science and Equity

There is a strong case for keeping genomic databases open. Biological research is cumulative and collaborative, and global sequence-sharing has enabled major advances in health and agriculture. Restricting access may slow innovation. But this openness has a structural blind spot worth confronting.

“Open access” is not the same as equitable access. Anyone may download genomic data, but not everyone has the technological capacity to convert it into value. Biodiversity is concentrated in developing countries, while the infrastructure to commercialise it largely is not. The result is familiar: the genetic diversity of a Brazilian rainforest or a Kenyan highland is sequenced, uploaded, downloaded, patented, and commercialised, with each step legal, each transfer legitimate and none of the resulting economic value returns to its point of biological origin

There is something uncomfortable about how quickly “open science” rhetoric ends this conversation. Greater openness may help science, but it does not automatically produce equity. The costs of the current system fall disproportionately on countries already lacking technological capacity and institutional influence.

Who Owns the Algorithm of Life

What often gets lost in treaty debates is that DSI is not merely creating a loophole, it is changing how biological value itself is created. A useful sequence is no longer valuable because of the organism carrying it, but because it can be computationally analysed, reproduced, and commercialised. Biology increasingly functions as information and that is precisely why existing IP frameworks struggle. They were built for material inventions and not informational abstractions.

Synthetic biology makes this even sharper. Scientists can now design new sequences using DSI from natural organisms and synthesise them without further interaction with the original resource. The biological value is extracted at the sequencing stage and reintroduced into commerce in a legally disconnected form. This raises a deeper discomfort. Many DSI-based patents do not create value from scratch, they capture and commercialise informational patterns shaped by evolution itself, often originating from ecosystems and communities that receive little recognition or return.

Attempts to resolve this problem are already underway. Proposals such as “bounded openness” seek to preserve open scientific exchange while ensuring that commercially successful uses of DSI contribute to benefit-sharing mechanisms. Yet recent CBD negotiations reveal how contested even this compromise remains. Countries continue to disagree not only on who should pay and how much, but more fundamentally on where value in DSI-based innovation actually lies.

Conclusion

The language of the CBD-Nagoya framework was built for a world where biological value remained tied to physical resources and territorial control. DSI unsettles that foundation. Biological value now moves as information: faster, cheaper and largely outside the governance structures designed for a materially different world.

The challenge, as I see it, is larger than regulatory design. Biodiversity law still speaks the language of physical resources and territorial control, while biotechnology increasingly operates through information. Biology today moves as sequences, datasets, and digital representations. Any meaningful response must begin by accepting that shift. Frameworks built around controlling physical access cannot govern information that spreads globally the moment it is generated. The real question is no longer how to regulate biological resources, but how to govern the informational value increasingly derived from them.

References

Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, Decision Adopted by the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity — 15/9: Digital Sequence Information on Genetic Resources, U.N. Doc. CBD/COP/DEC/15/9 (Dec. 19, 2022), https://www.cbd.int/doc/decisions/cop-15/cop-15-dec-09-en.pdf

Ad Hoc Open-Ended Working Group on Benefit-Sharing from the Use of Digital Sequence Information on Genetic Resources, Draft Recommendation on Further Development of the Multilateral Mechanism for Benefit-Sharing from the Use of Digital Sequence Information on Genetic Resources, Including a Global Fund, U.N. Doc. CBD/WG-DSI/2/L.2 (Aug. 16, 2024).

Pedro Henrique D. Batista, Proposal for a Global Regulation of Digital Sequence Information, Max Planck Inst. for Innovation & Competition Research Paper No. 24-10 (2024).

Carlos M. Correa, Access to and Benefit Sharing of Marine Genetic Resources Beyond National Jurisdiction: Developing a New Legally Binding Instrument, S. Centre Research Paper No. 79 (Sept. 2016).

Joseph Henry Vogel, Natasha C. Jiménez-Revelles & Xavier A. Maldonado-Ramírez de Arellano, Decision 15/9 and the Nagoya Protocol: Who Should Get What in the Multilateral Benefit-Sharing Mechanism?, S. Centre Research Paper No. 210 (Sept. 2024).

Gerd Winter & Evanson Chege Kamau, Common Pools of Genetic Resources: Equity and Innovation in International Biodiversity Law (Routledge 2013).

Bronwyn Parry, Trading the Genome: Investigating the Commodification of Bio-Information (Columbia Univ. Press 2004).

Viviana Munoz Tellez, A Fair Solution for Access and Sharing of Benefits of Digital Sequence Information? Decision for the CBD COP in November 2024, SouthViews No. 275 (S. Centre, Oct. 4, 2024).