Abstract
Efforts to identify specialty crop genetics and agronomics, such as for edamame (vegetable soybean), that improve crop yields, resilience, and sustainability often fail to account for data on nutritional content, sensory profile, and/or consumer acceptability. Limited exchange of data across agricultural and food sectors challenges the design of specialty crops that meet consumer needs and expectations and the value chain, and can increase cyberbiosecurity risks. Communication and collaboration within the multi-sector system are essential to address cyberbiosecurity issues related to privacy of data producers, ownership of original data, risks of data sharing, security protection for data transfer and storage, and public perceptions of the food supply chain. This paper introduces a new exploration to design domestic (U.S.) edamame, which is based on both our domain knowledge of life science and our information-sharing mechanisms across the agriculture and food sectors. A case study, involving a multidisciplinary team of breeders and non-breeder researchers with expertise in crop/food production, processing, quality, and economics, serves as a model. We introduce the value chain attributed to combining and linking data from different sectors in the research and development phase, and explain why we believe such data-sharing mechanisms can facilitate better analyses that resonate throughout the full system, from seed to consumer. Our perspective illustrates that, by securely sharing and interpreting data across sectors and identifying cyberbiosecurity risks, we can design promising agricultural and food systems to better meet consumers' need and protection of life science data.
Highlights
For life science data to have the most significant impact and realized value, data digitization, and sharing across sectors inform and create the evidence chain allowing for innovation, trust, and application
We identified the need for integrated training for developing and advanced scientists to encourage them to change their intentions and behaviors to encourage adoption of rigorous practices to work toward more consistent handling practices of sensitive data
Vinatzer et al (2019) suggested in their work that the little attention that is currently dedicated to cyberbiosecurity risks to online biological databases may be associated with the fact cyberattacks to such databases would directly affect fewer people than attacks to large enterprises. Applying this perception to the Specialty Crop Research Initiative (SCRI) edamame project discussed in our focus group meeting, we suggest that the large edamame dataset, generated by several departments of multiple public academic institutions, is possibly more vulnerable to cyberattacks than crop data generated by large seed companies, for example
Summary
For life science data to have the most significant impact and realized value, data digitization, and sharing across sectors inform and create the evidence chain allowing for innovation, trust, and application. Cyberbiosecurity is defined as “understanding the vulnerabilities to unwanted surveillance, intrusions, and malicious and harmful activities which can occur within or at the interfaces of commingled life and medical sciences, cyber, cyber-physical, supply chain and infrastructure systems, and developing and instituting measures to prevent, protect against, mitigate, investigate and attribute such threats as it pertains to security, competitiveness, and resilience” (Murch et al, 2018) This adds the role of responsibility and accountability for data and cyber-physical systems protection to life science researchers, small business owners, and major industries within the specific agricultural sector as well as across the system. This is, a concern of relevance to national security and protection of our bioeconomy (George, 2019; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2020)
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