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Better Luck Next Time

Apr 07, 2009

A federal appeals court ruled against Amgen in the in re Kubin case. In 2000, the US Patent and Trademarks office rejected a patent application submitted by Immunex for the gene encoding the NAIL protein, which plays a role in immune response, because isolating the gene took "routine skill." Amgen, which bought Immunex in the interim, appealed the decision. "The court's ruling is one of many signs that claims based on gene sequences are getting much tougher scrutiny now than in the past," Science Insider's Eliot Marshall says. The full decision is here.

Breaking News
The Scan

Gone, But Now Reconstructed SARS-CoV-2 Genomes

In a preprint, a researcher describes his recovery of viral sequences that had been removed from a common database.

Rare Heart Inflammation Warning

The Food and Drug Administration is adding a warning about links between a rare inflammatory heart condition and two SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, Reuters reports.

Sandwich Sampling

The New York Times sent tuna sandwiches for PCR analysis.

Nature Papers Describe Gut Viruses, New Format for Storing Quantitative Genomic Data, More

In Nature this week: catalog of DNA viruses of the human gut microbiome, new dense depth data dump format to store quantitative genomic data, and more.