Plant Bioscience Limited is pleased to announce that its patent relating to the CleanGene™ transformation system has been granted in the USA as U.S. patent number 6,846,970.

The CleanGene™ transformation system was developed by Professor Paul Christou and colleagues at the John Innes Centre in Norwich. The technology represents a significant and important improvement to conventional methods of plant transformation using direct DNA transfer. The use of minimal expression vectors, comprising linear DNA fragments containing only promoter, transgene coding region and terminator/polyadenylation sites used in the CleanGene™ technology limits the occurrence of these illegitimate recombination events. While maintaining all the desirable benefits of bombardment technology (genotype independence, ecological safety, high co-transformation frequency), CleanGene™ produces transgenic plants with very simple integration patterns and low transgene copy numbers, resulting in stable expression over many generations and almost no transgene silencing.

PBL is now offering the CleanGene™ transformation system for licensing.

Plant Bioscience Limited (PBL) is an independent technology management company specialising in plant and microbial science.