Intellectual Property Rights in the Field of Molecular Marker Analysis

Abstract

Intellectual property rights – and especially patents – become more and more important in biotechnology as there are many industrial applications with high economic value. The economic value of biotechnological inventions, especially in the field of agrobiotechnology, is increasing with the worldwide expansion of the cultivation of transgenic plants (Herrlinger et al. 2003). Beyond this, patents on plant-related inventions can influence the funding that is available for research, in particular in the private sector of biotechnology (Fleck and Baldock 2003). Conventional (non-transgenic) plant breeding and plant breeding research is also strongly influenced by biotechnological processes and methods. One tool that has found its way into conventional plant breeding is molecular marker analysis of significant traits (e.g. resistance against pathogens, yield) or DNA fingerprinting with the help of molecular markers to obtain information on the relationship between individual plants. Moreover, with the improvements in our understanding of the genomes and in our knowledge of the relations between genotype and phenotype in economically important crops, this tool will become more significant in practical plant breeding. The importance of molecular marker analysis for the different applications was recognized very early so that many patents have been filed in the last 10–15 years. For scientists in all institutions, public or private sector, an understanding of intellectual property rights (IPRs) is fundamental in both research and development (Kowalski et al. 2002), but many scientists are still not aware of the rising number of patents in this field. This chapter will give an overview of patents for methods and applications in the field of microsatellite markers or simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers.