On February 15, the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board ruled that the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard deserved the patent that it was granted in 2014 for the use of CRISPR in eukaryotes. Lawyers representing Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues, who first used the technology in prokaryotes, had claimed that the Broad’s patent directly competed with their work. The ruling was a “decisive victory” for the Broad, Jake Sherkow of New York Law School told The Scientist. UC Berkeley may still appeal the decision.
Publicly available DNA sequences are more prone to error than previously thought, according to a study published February 16 in Science. Using an algorithm, researchers estimated that 41 percent of samples in the 1000 Genomes database and 73 percent of samples in the Cancer Genome Atlas likely incurred mutations in sample processing—human error, rather than ...
