Davide Faggionato

I am a research associate with experience in molecular biology and science policy, I represent the department of Science Policy, of the Leibniz Institute DSMZ in Braunschweig, Germany (https://www.dsmz.de/research/science-policy)

With our department's expertise,

• We can establish the consortium’s national and international compliance with access and benefit-sharing legislation related to the use of genetic resources, such as microbial materials.

• We can maximize the impact of the consortium’s achievements on current science policy by leveraging its practical outputs and scientific results to actively engage with United Nations forums and contribute to ongoing policy debates and negotiations.

In our department we address:

• Compliance of research consortia with the legislative frameworks of access and benefit sharing derived from the use of genetic resources, such as the Nagoya Protocol.

  We aim to facilitate effective solutions, for example (but not limited to) microbial resources, that meet the needs of scientific users and fairness and equity for providing countries.

• Policy and engagement, we follow the debates and negotiations taking place within UN fora such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and the Agreeement on Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction. We bring scientific results and empirical evidence from (micro)biological diversity and research consortia into the policy arena.

• Connects scientific networks and biodiversity-focused organizations with policy actors and vice versa.

Examples of our activities are

• the German Nagoya Protocol HuB: https://www.nagoyaprotocol-hub.de/

• Participation in consortia funded by the European Union's HORIZON program such as:

  • European Viral Outbreak Response Alliance (EVORA) https://evora-project.eu/

  • the Microbiome Biobanking (RI) Enabler (MICROBE) https://www.microbeproject.eu/

• The coordination of the DSI Scientific Network: https://www.dsiscientificnetwork.org/

Selected publications from our department:

Raposo, Débora S et al. “How can biological databases support the new UN mechanism for benefit-sharing from digital sequence information?.” Scientific data vol. 13,1 971. 24 Jun. 2026, doi:10.1038/s41597-026-07725-y

Faggionato, Davide et al. “Policy in Practice: How to do the Nagoya Protocol: common misconceptions, challenges and best practices for access and benefit-sharing compliance.” Sustainable microbiology vol. 3,2 qvag007. 18 Feb. 2026, doi:10.1093/sumbio/qvag007

Muñoz-García, M., et al. (2025). Navigating COP16's digital sequence information outcomes: What researchers need to do in practice. Patterns (New York, N.Y.), 6(3), 101208. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2025.101208

Nunez-Vega, G., et al. (2025). A new indicator for the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework: Capturing non-monetary benefit data from access and benefit-sharing agreements. Bioscience, 75(4), 298–306. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biae132

Sett, S., et al. (2022). Access and benefit-sharing by the European Virus Archive in response to COVID-19. The Lancet. Microbe, 3(4), e316–e323. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2666-5247(21)00211-1

Overmann, J., & Scholz, A. H. (2017). Microbiological Research Under the Nagoya Protocol: Facts and Fiction. Trends in microbiology, 25(2), 85–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.2016.11.001