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The ownership question of plant gene and genome intellectual properties

Nature Biotechnology volume 33, pages 1138–1143 (2015)Cite this article

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The restructuring of the crop agriculture industry over the past two decades has enabled patent holders to exclude, prevent and deter others from using certain research tools and delay or block further follow-on inventions.

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Figure 1: Holdings of granted patents and their referenced sequences in the claims (GC) of the hand-edited plant-related collection, based on the edited applicant and owner data.
Figure 2: Contribution of public and private sectors to maize, rice and soybean gene patenting activities from 1993–2014.
Figure 3: PVP certificates issued for three major crop varieties, 1990–2014.
Figure 4: Utility patents issued from 1990 to 2014.

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Acknowledgements

We thank I. Medina (University of Cambridge) for ongoing support of Genome Maps and making the crop genomes available in Cellbase; P. Howard (Michigan State University) for sharing data on the changes of ownership in the US agriculture seed industry from 1996 to 2013; the Lens team at Cambia for continually improving the Lens features; and Small Multiples (Sydney) for help in improving the standalone PatSeq toolkit. We are particularly grateful for review by S. Hughes at the early stages of this project. This work was supported, in part, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 2013 Global Health Grant–Cambia Lens Accelerated Grant OPP1104285 (R.A.J.); Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Grant GBMF 3465 (R.A.J.) and Queensland University Technology Grant 321121-0023/08 (O.A.J.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Osmat A. Jefferson, Deniz Köllhofer, Thomas H. Ehrich and Richard A. Jefferson are at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, and at Cambia, Canberra, Australia.,

    Osmat A Jefferson, Deniz Köllhofer, Thomas H Ehrich & Richard A Jefferson

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  1. Osmat A Jefferson
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  2. Deniz Köllhofer
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Correspondence to Osmat A Jefferson or Richard A Jefferson.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Table 1

Overview of the diverse national policies adopted on the protection of plant and plant varieties in various countries around the world. (XLSX 13 kb)

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Jefferson, O., Köllhofer, D., Ehrich, T. et al. The ownership question of plant gene and genome intellectual properties. Nat Biotechnol 33, 1138–1143 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3393

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