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Technology : Intellectual Property Rights : Patent Landscapes
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Patent Landscapes
With the increasing importance of patents, it is highly advantageous for scientists and business developers to be versed in the field of intellectual property. An understanding of patents is necessary to optimizing business opportunities, particularly in the area of agriculture.
Patent landscapes provide an overview of key patents in some of the more important areas of biotechnology. The information in these reports is not exhaustive, but consists of selected documents found to broadly encompass the area. These landscapes furnish platform knowledge from which additional self-directed investigation can be performed.
Patent landscapes, by their very nature, become outdated. While the landscapes contain much useful information about the broad state of the art at the time they were prepared, new patent applications are published, some patents will lapse or expire and others come into force. Thus, landscapes should be viewed as an insight and snapshot of the subject.
Patentlens provides these landscapes under a Creative Commons License  .
Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of plants
This first technology landscape is focused on the intellectual property concerning methods and materials used for Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of plants. This transformation method is currently one of the most widely used means of making transgenic plants. Although much of the basic research and findings that led to Agrobacterium-mediated transformation was done in public institutions, the private sector now holds many of the key patent positions. Many of the patents were obtained by the private sector either from internal research and development or from public institutions in the form of a license or occasionally as the assignee. Thus, the science and the patent positions are of high interest to both public and commercial sectors.
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Promoters Used to Regulate Gene Expression
Regulatory elements are crucial to gene expression. This paper discusses the patent landscape of some widely used transcriptional regulators that are constitutively active, spatially active (e.g. tissue-specific or tissue-preferred), and temporally active (e.g. induced or active in response to a certain chemical or physical stimulus) in plants.
The interest in promoters stems from the myriad opportunities for controlling gene expression. The study and understanding of the function of their multiple components and the factors associated with their performance have opened up the possibility of modulation of the expression of genes in homologous organisms as well as in heterologous organisms, where foreign promoters together with genes of interest are inserted. Promoters are regarded as molecular biological tools crucial for the regulation of the expression of genes of interest. As such, promoter-related patents have a huge influence in follow-on research and development in biotechnology.
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Antibiotic Resistance Genes and their Uses in Plant Genetic Transformation
Antibiotic resistance genes are widely used as selectable markers because they are highly efficient, economical and straightforward. Therefore, they are considered a very valuable tool at experimental and commercial research levels.
The present paper analyses the extent of patent protection on the use of any antibiotic resistance gene, mainly for plant transformation the most commonly used antibiotic resistance marker genes: neomycin phosphotransferase (npt) and hygromycin phosphotransferase (hpt).
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Resistance to Phosphinothricin
Phosphinothricin (also known as glufosinate, sold under trade names BASTA, Buster and Liberty) is a broad spectrum herbicide. In transgenic plants resistance to this herbicide is conferred the insertion into crop plants of the bar gene, isolated from bacteria. The patent ownership and licensing and the biochemical mechanism of this resistance are discussed in this paper.
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Positive Selection
Rather than conferring resistance to a negative or toxic substance, positive selection involves conferring onto the transformed cell a metabolic advantage such as the capability of sugar consumption, or other competitive advantages for stimulating cell growth over nontransformed cells such as response to hormone and adaptation to extreme temperature. Positive selection systems in the purest sense identify and select genetically transformed cells without damaging or killing the non-transformed cells in the population, and without co-introduction of antibiotic or herbicide resistance genes.
This landscape covers use of a gene for selection that converts a neutral or toxic compound to a growth-promoting molecule.
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Rice Genome
This landscape provides an overview of the legal aspects and patents of the rice genome. The analysis centers on DNA sequences that are claimed in United States patents and patent applications that have significant homology to the fully-sequenced rice genome.
Rice is an important economic crop, as well as a major subsistence crop for large populations. Also, as the first cereal genome that has been sequenced, the patenting behavior of rice sequences will serve as a model for how sustenance crop genes are patented in the future.
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Bioindicators
Plants can be engineered as living instruments, to provide farmers with valuable, timely and low-cost means to measure and monitor the status of their natural resources. This will provide new opportunities for empowering local choices about what to do with local crops, rather than bringing in crops and methods from elsewhere. Such engineering integrates the use of novel methods of molecular biology with the basic understanding of a field problem and a farmer-centered view about overcoming real challenges to sustainable, profitable crop production.
This paper contains examples of engineered bioindicators, and an analysis of the patents and patent applications that cover the field of bioindicators or biosentinels
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