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REGULATORY NEWS

CRISPR Patent Rights: A Blazing Dispute Briefly Extinguished
Phill Jones

For centuries, the United States government granted patents to the first party to invent the claimed subject matter. This first-to-invent patent law system was based upon the US Constitution which gives Congress the authority to promote the useful arts by securing for limited times to inventors certain exclusive rights to their inventions. The America Invents Act, effective March 16, 2013, converted the traditional first-to-invent system to a first-to-file system, a change that will eventually eliminate the PTO's interference proceeding. That date became significant in a patent dispute over technology described a year earlier in a Science report: CRISPR-based gene editing.

PLANT RESEARCH NEWS

CRISPR/Cas9 Platform for Precise Gene Knockout Mutagenesis in Cotton
Chao Li, Turgay Unver, and Baohong Zhang

Improvement of cotton fiber quality and yield as well tolerance to environmental abiotic and biotic stresses are a priority for cotton research. The complex genome of allotetraploid cotton makes it challenging to conduct gene function studies and to effect genetic improvement through transgenesis. In our study, we used CRISPR/Cas9 and Agrobacterium-mediated genetic transformation to efficiently knockout an individual cotton protein-coding and small regulatory RNA gene.

African Rice for Low-input Agriculture Systems
Jos van Boxtel

The development of low-input rice has been an objective of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) since 2006. Recent work by Selvaraj et al. published in Plant Biotechnology Journal2 describes the first results of this intercontinental collaboration. Three cycles of confined field trials in two environments showed that rice overexpressing a nitrogen use efficiency gene can outperform controls under limiting nitrogen applications. These trials, performed by researchers from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Columbia, were the first in a series of trials that span three African countries, Uganda, Ghana, and Nigeria.