Recent Patents on DNA & Gene Sequences

Burning fossil-fuels to meet the global energy requirements by human being has intensified the concerns of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. Therefore, serious efforts are required to develop nonfossil-based renewable energy sources. Plants are more efficient in utilizing solar energy to convert it into biomass which can be used as feedstocks for biofuel production. Hence with the increasing demands of energy and the needs of cost-effective, sustainable production of fuels, it has become necessary to switch over to plant biomass as a renewable source of energy...

Endometriosis is a gynecological disease that affects up to 10%-15% of all reproductive-age women worldwide. It is characterized by the presence of endometrial tissues outside the uterine cavity. Endometriosis is a complex disease; its pathogenesis includes altered steroid metabolism and immune system abnormalities such as inflammation, increased angiogenic activity in the peritoneal fluid and impaired recognition of ectopic endometrial cells. The development of endometriosis also depends on genetic, anatomical and environmental factors...

The grain amaranths were important food crops for the ancient middle and South American civilization. The germplasm of amaranths also has not been well characterized from the point of view of its exploitation for improvement of amaranths in general, a grain amaranth in particular. Among all under exploited crops grain amaranth is the most suitable candidate to begin with. As it is one of the most important under exploited crops being used as subsidiary or supplementary food. This work will report a study concerning the patent related to the biotechnological applications of Amaranths...

Research and development of biological hydrogen production have expanded significantly in the past decade. Production of renewable hydrogen from agricultural, forestry, or other organic waste streams offers the possibility to contribute to hydrogen production capacity with no net, or at least with lower, greenhouse gas emissions. Significant improvements in the volumetric or molar yields of hydrogen production have been accomplished through genetic engineering of hydrogen synthesizing microorganisms. Although no commercial scale renewable biohydrogen production facilities are currently in operation, a few pilot scale systems have been demonstrated successfully, and while industrial scale production of biohydrogen still faces a number of technical and economic barriers, understanding the patent landscape is an important step in developing a viable commercialization strategy...

C-reactive protein (CRP) is a homopentameric oligoprotein composed of monomeric subunits that are about 21 kD each. The form of detectable native CRP in validated assays was developed in 2007 and from that time has been considered as an excellent biomarker for peripheral artery disease and/or atherosclerosis, as well as a cardiovascular disease marker for risk prediction. The improvements in the detection of CRP levels could predict significantly the population that have increased risk of stroke being the modulation of CRP levels as a therapeutical outcome for prevention of cardiovascular diseases...

A technique has emerged over the past decade combining chromatin immunoprecipitation with DNA microarray analysis. This is a powerful and sensitive strategy that has been used extensively to characterise protein interactions with chromatin and epigenetic changes such as acetylation and methylation throughout the genome of different organisms. This technique has revolutionised our understanding of molecular genomics, continues to be widely used and is currently being applied in novel areas of cancer research...

Directed evolution shortcuts million-year-scale natural evolution in a matter of weeks and generates tens of millions of sequence variants in a single test tube. A team of researchers used random DNA flanked by homologous sequences for in vivo homologous recombination, known as multiplex automated genome engineering (MAGE) to select the most active gene variants. They also adopted this approach to replace hundreds of stop codons in the E. coli genome, showing potential for genome-wide engineering. The blank codon created was harnessed to enlarge the amino acid alphabet, and unnatural amino acid has been incorporated to polypeptides...

The Serine Protease Inhibitors (Serpins) have been a focus of research by biomedical industries due to their critical role in human health. The use of serpin in the treatment of many diseases was widely investigated through the identification of new genes encoding these proteins in all kingdoms of life. The characterization of these genes revealed that they encoded proteins having low sequence homologies. Future developments are focusing not only on the protease inhibition activity, but also on the other effects due to the interactions of serpins with other components such as hormone transport...

An absent word (also called a forbidden word or an unword in other contexts) in a sequence is a segment that does not appear in the given sequence. It is a minimal absent word if all its proper factors occur in the given sequence. In this article, we review the concept of minimal absent words, which includes the notion of shortest absent words but is much stronger. We present an efficient method for computing the minimal absent words of bounded length for DNA sequence using a Trie of bounded depth, representing bounded length factors...

In this paper we present a method for finding infrequent simple motifs in a finite set of sequences. The method uses a lattice structure and minimal forbidden patterns. It is based on a method for solving the Simple Motif Problem and has the potential to discover new patents in biological macromolecules. Indeed, the extracted motifs can help biologists to learn about the biological functions of these macromolecules and, consequently, can help them to understand the mechanisms of the biological processes in which these sequences are involved...

Motif finding in DNA, RNA and proteins plays an important role in life science research. Recent patents concerning motif finding in biomolecular data are recorded in the DNA Patent Database which serves as a resource for policy makers and members of the general public interested in fields like genomics, genetics and biotechnology. In this paper, we present a computational approach to mining for RNA tertiary motifs in genomic sequences. Specifically, we describe a method, named CSminer, and show, as a case study, the application of CSminer to genome-wide search for coaxial helical stackings in RNA 3-way junctions...

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is one of the topics of bio informatics that has seriously been researched. It is known as NP-complete problem. It is also considered as one of the most important and daunting tasks in computational biology. Concerning this a wide number of heuristic algorithms have been proposed to find optimal alignment. Among these heuristic algorithms are genetic algorithms (GA). The GA has mainly two major weaknesses: it is time consuming and can cause local minima. One of the significant aspects in the GA process in MSA is to maximize the similarities between sequences by adding and shuffling the gaps of Solution Coding (SC)...

In this paper, we present efficient algorithms for finding indeterminate Arc-Annotated patterns in indeterminate Arc-Annotated references. Our algorithms run in O(m+ (nm) w) time where n and m are respectively the length of our reference and pattern strings and w is the target machine word size. Here we have assumed the alphabet size to be constant, because, indeterminate Arc-Annotated sequences are used to model biological sequences. Clearly, for short patterns, our algorithms run in linear time and efficient algorithms for matching short patterns to reference genomes have huge applications in practical settings...

MOTIVATION: Pairwise sequence alignment has received a new motivation due to the advent of recent patents in next-generation sequencing technologies, particularly so for the application of re-sequencing---the assembly of a genome directed by a reference sequence. After the fast alignment between a factor of the reference sequence and a high-quality fragment of a short read by a short-read alignment programme, an important problem is to find the alignment between a relatively short succeeding factor of the reference sequence and the remaining low-quality part of the read allowing a number of mismatches and the insertion of a single gap in the alignment...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

With dwindling fossil oil resources and increased economic growth of many developing countries due to globalization, energy driven from an alternative source such as bio-energy in a sustainable fashion is the need of the hour. However, production of energy from biological source is relatively expensive due to low starch and sugar contents of bioenergy plants leading to lower oil yield and reduced quality along with lower conversion efficiency of feedstock. In this context genetic improvement of bio-energy plants offers a viable solution...

Protein kinase C (PKC) comprises a family of 10 serine/threonine kinases divided into 3 subfamilies: classical, novel and atypical. These isoenzymes represent one of the major mediators of signal transduction, and most may be associated with several pathogenic processes including malignant transformation or cancer and metastasis. Moreover, some activated isoenzymes are also involved in other diseases such as infarct, rejection due to incomplete histocompatibility in organ transplantation, pain, diabetic macular edema, etc...

Most types of bacteria produce bacteriocins, which are proteinaceous extracellular compounds that can inhibit the growth of other undesirable microorganisms. Bacteriocins are receiving increasing attention, due to their many applications, ranging from their initial application in strategies for food preservation to more recent proposed uses in biomedical strategies aimed at fighting certain bacterial infections. Thus, while nisin has a long history of use as a safe additive in certain food products for the purpose of food preservation, certain bacteriocin-producing lactic acid bacteria, which are generally recognised as safe microorganisms, or their extracellular extracts are receiving increased attention as protective cultures or antimicrobial extracts in minimally processed food products...

Development of sustainable energy systems based on renewable biomass feedstocks is now a global effort. Lignocellulosic biomass contains polymers of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin, bound together in a complex structure. Liquid biofuels, such as ethanol, can be made from biomass via fermentation of sugars derived from the cellulose and hemicellulose within lignocellulosic materials, but pre-treatment of the biomass to release sugars for microbial conversion is a significant barrier to commercial success of lignocellulosic biofuel production...

The present world energy situation urgently requires exploring and developing alternate, sustainable sources for fuel. Biofuels have proven to be an effective energy source but more needs to be produced to meet energy goals. Whereas first generation biofuels derived from mainly corn and sugarcane continue to be used and produced, the contentious debate between "feedstock versus foodstock" continues. The need for sources that can be grown under different environmental conditions has led to exploring newer sources...