Back to the Supreme

December 03, 2012

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The gene patenting fight is heading back to the US Supreme Court, the Associated Press reports. According to ScienceInsider, the court added that it will only consider the issue of whether human genes are "patent-eligible."

"It will be very useful to get a definitive ruling on some of the issues at stake," Hank Greely, a Stanford University law professor tells the Nature News Blog.

As Daily Scan's sister publication GenomeWeb Daily News notes, the case was first filed in 2009 by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Public Patent Foundation, the Association for Molecular Pathology, and others against Myriad Genetics concerning its patents surrounding the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The suit has since been wending its way through the legal system. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled recently, after being directed by the Supreme Court to reconsider the case, that isolated DNA is patentable.

The AP adds that the case will likely go before the Supreme Court in the spring, with its ruling to follow in the summer.

Sometimes it is not easy to

Submitted by radim.brdicka on Tue, 12/04/2012 - 04:44.

Sometimes it is not easy to distinguish between discovery and invention. But also other views have to be added to reach the decision. E.g. general health profit and individual material value. For this reason patenting of human genes is to be avoided.

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Library preparation methods continue to be challenged by the requirement for faster and more efficient protocols, using lower input amounts. In this online seminar, recorded Feb. 7, 2013, experts discuss new approaches to tackle these challenges, particularly for bacterial and exome sequencing.

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Sandra Pankow

Research Associate
Scripps Research Institute

The Cystic Fibrosis Interactome

Sandra Pankow is currently a research associate in John Yates' lab at Scripps Research Institute, studying protein-protein interactions involved in cystic fibrosis.

"I'm interested in trying to understand genetic diseases from a systems biology point of view," she says. "I've found that proteomics is the ideal tool for this because it gives the researcher the possibility to investigate thousands of proteins at the same time rather than just having to guess which one or two you should look at."

During her time in the Yates lab, Pankow has worked on developing a new technique for large-scale profiling of protein-protein interactions called co-purifying protein identification technology, or CoPIT. The method uses co-purification of proteins followed by mass spectrometry analysis and bioinformatic processing to identify not just primary protein-protein interactions, but second-degree and third-degree interactors as well.

With it, Pankow says, "we've reached about 30-fold to 100-fold higher sensitivity than previous methods. We're now able to profile an interactome to near completeness."
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Stanford University scientists publish a study demonstrating high-throughput human proteome quantification, and its combination with DNA variation and transcriptome information to add a "new dimension" to the characterization of gene expression regulation. The investigators used isobaric tag-based quantitative mass spectrometry to determine relative protein levels of 5,953 genes in lymphoblastoid cell lines from 95 diverse individuals genotyped in the HapMap Project. They found that protein levels are heritable molecular phenotypes and have considerable variation between individuals, populations, and sexes. Additionally, the investigators found protein quantitative trait loci, including variants not detected by previous transcriptome studies.

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A group from the US, UK, and Colombia describes findings from a comparative genomics-based study on a form of adaptive variation in butterflies known as mimetic wing coloring. By sequencing co-mimicking Heliconius butterflies from two species and a handful of hybrid zones, researchers narrowed in on a color pattern-associated site near a gene already implicated in red color variation — an apparent regulatory region suspected of evolving by convergence in the two species distantly related species. "Using a combination of next-generation sequencing analyses, we have refined our understanding of the genetic architecture of wing pattern variation in Heliconius," they write, "and gained important insights into the evolution of novel adaptive phenotypes in natural populations."
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Hologic has appointed former Beckman Coulter head Scott Garrett to its board of directors, where he will serve on the corporate development committee.
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An international team has sequenced the genome of the carnivorous bladderwort plant, Utricularia gibba. Their findings suggest that the carnivorous plant has ditched virtually all its non-coding DNA, retaining a set of sequences that's almost exclusively genic. "What that says is that you can have a perfectly good multicellular plant with lots of different cells, organs, tissue types and flowers, and you can do it without the ['junk' DNA]," said co-corresponding author Victor Albert.
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Agilent Technologies announced a restructuring program expected to reduce its headcount by about 450 employees and save the company $50 million annually in operating expenses. CEO Bill Sullivan said that the focus of the restructuring will be on Agilent's Electronic Measurement Group and that the company will explore opportunities "to streamline our organization around the world." The firm also announced that its Q2 revenues were flat year over year.
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The US Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute has funded six new initiatives to develop technologies that will help JGI and its users conduct their research efforts into microbiology, metagenomics, and plant genomics. The projects will be supported under the Emerging Technologies Opportunity Program with a total of around $3.5 million over the next two years. Among the researchers receiving funding are Stephen Quake and Jay Shendure.
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GenomeWebinar: Advances in Single-Cell Genomics: Live Cell RNA and Circulating miRNA Detection

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GenomeWeb and EMD Millipore invite you to view an archived webinar discussing new approaches to detect RNA at the single-cell level as well as new probes for the direct quantification of circulating miRNAs. In this free online seminar, recorded April 25, 2013, our expert panel shares protocols for improved RNA and miRNA detection.

On-demand recording available here.

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