Recent Patents on Biotechnology - Volume 1, Issue 3, 2007

Bacterial genetic properties can be readily altered by a range of techniques, for example, when a mixture of recipient bacteria, donor genes, and nano-sized acicular material are stimulated by sliding friction on surface of the hydrogel such as agarose or gellan gum. In this particular case, a phenomenon called the Yoshida effect is responsible. Specially designed apparatus has been developed to investigate this effect in an effort to identify technical applications, such as the quantitative detection of asbestos. Current patents related to plasmid transformation methods for prokaryotes and quantitative detection of environmental asbestos are also presented.

Carotenoids represent a class of diverse compounds naturally present in bacteria, fungi, algae and plants. Animals cannot synthesize carotenoids de novo and need to obtain them from diet. Carotenoids serve a variety of functions such as antioxidants, colorants and precursors of vitamins. Chemical synthesis of carotenoids is challenging and costly. Extraction from plants is also laborious and often limited by the availability of the sources. There exists a demand for microbial production of carotenoids by fermentation. This paper reviews recent patents on microbial biotechnology to illustrate advances in microbial carotenoid production. Patents on composition of matters such as new strains, new genes or gene clusters, and improved genes, as well as methods on production of carotenoids to increase titer and purity are discussed.

This review summarizes the 179 compounds from fungi that have shown to possess nematicidal activities. These compounds belong to diverse chemical groups and they are mainly isolated from a variety of deuteromycete, ascomycete and basidiomycete fungi. Some of them have been patented as nematicidal agents. We review and classify these compounds based on their structural types. Their nematicidal activities are described and their potential roles in natural environments and in the biocontrol of nematodes are discussed.

Influenza virus is the pathogen responsible for the epidemic influenza and current vaccines include inactivated and live attenuated viruses which are produced in chicken eggs. However, these vaccines posses various drawbacks of their own and the protection rate ranges from 30-80% depending on match between strains included in the vaccine and circulating strains, leaving significant room for improvement. This review provides background information regarding the influenza vaccines and extends the discussion with an emphasis on the new patents published or granted over the last five years. These patents primarily aim at ameliorating existing bottlenecks in vaccine development and are associated with vaccine compositions that provide strong vaccine efficacies and broader cross-reactivity, and various vaccine platforms such as DNA vaccines, recombinant subunit, peptide and viral vector vaccines.

An unprecedented and accelerated process of privatizing biological information is emerging from the new techniques of systems biology as they are used to develop novel treatments to key multigenic ailments that account for a large share of mortality worldwide, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity, and diabetes. The systems approach potentially allows the capture of proprietary knowledge at the cross-roads of the flow of biological information preceding these diseases, namely, from the endoplasmic reticulum stress response downstream to inflammation and disease. Although it still holds true that such pathways cannot be patented, methods and chemical substances discussed here are the subject of patents and applications by major research universities and biopharmaceutical companies to a considerable degree of overlapping information. Because biological information pathways are organized into hierarchical networks, the race seems to be on the regulation of the upstream functional modules, and because these complex networks are dominated by gene-hubs and their translation products, the winner will be the one that can appropriate specific and well described methods and substances to control the upper levels of regulation of the entire system. The road to success, however, lays formidable obstacles ahead due to the long and difficult processes separating applications being filed, from patents already issued and these from those that have survived validity litigation. It will be expected that for the sake of mankind, patents pools will be offered to develop novel therapeutics based on the biological information controlled by gene-hubs.

Starch is the major energy store for many plants and has been extensively exploited by humans for millennia, first as a food source and more recently in a wide variety of non-food applications. The starch properties of the plant species which were first selected by humans have been improved for some time, first by the identification and selection of genotypes with favourable natural variation, then by a process of controlled crosses and selection of offspring with desirable traits and more recently by the generation of synthetic mutants and transgenic plants. Many genes involved in starch synthesis have been identified at the molecular level, providing the means of both manipulating starch properties in novel ways and defining how useful changes to the starch have been made. The commercial value of this understanding is reflected in the expansion of the patent literature where knowledge surrounding each of the genes of starch biosynthesis has been protected in the patent literature. Changes to starch structure have been made using transgenic and conventional breeding methods and these methods are described in the patent literature. Transgenic approaches usually either reduce the activity of an endogenous protein or replace an endogenous protein with a protein from another species. Conventional breeding still plays a role in the recent patent literature and has been used to create new combinations of alleles which in turn generates starch with novel properties.

Angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE)-inhibitory drugs have been used as therapeutic tools in the clinical management of hypertension and associated cardiovascular disorders. Food-derived ACE-inhibitory peptides have lower potency than similar acting drugs but the peptides usually have no adverse side effects and there is virtually no risk of overdosing that is associated with drugs. This review summarizes several patents that have reported the development of technologies for the production of potent food protein-derived hydrolysates and peptides, which can be used to formulate antihypertensive functional foods and nutraceuticals. A common process to all the patents is the use of proteases to split large inactive proteins into smaller bioactive peptides. Ultrafiltration may be combined with liquid chromatography methods to separate the peptides according to size alone or a combination of size and charge density, respectively. Efficacy of the protein hydrolysates or peptide fractions is evaluated first in an in vitro system and may then be confirmed by measuring their hypotensive ability in an appropriate animal model such as the spontaneously hypertensive rats. Finally, protein hydrolysates or peptide fractions that have hypotensive ability may then be used to formulate foods, beverages or pills that can be taken as therapeutic tools against hypertension.

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