Second Patent Family

This patent family has patent applications filed in the United States, Europe, Australia and Canada. However, the applications in the US, Europe and Canada have lapsed. For the purpose of providing the disclosed art as prior art,  only brief information about this patent family is  provide here, but it should be noted that the application may still be pending in Australia, and continuations may still be pending elsewhere.

Some bibliographic data is outlined in the following table:

What’s disclosed in this patent family

The patent applications are directed to nucleotide sequences of plant promoters comprising synthetic multimeric promoter elements regions (SMPERs). The different sequences of the SMPERs contain the following promoter elements:

• the dehydration or drought responsive element (DRE) of Arabidopsis, which is part of a stress-responsive gene promoter;
• the abscisic acid responsive element (ABRE) of maize, which acts in embryo development;
• the activating sequence (AS-1) of the Cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV), which mediates both salicylic acid- and auxin-inducible transcriptional activation;
• the DNA-binding domain of the rice transcription factor GT-2; and
• the proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) IIA gene promoter element of rice, which confers meristematic tissue-specific expression.

The SMPERs can be linked to any other promoters, native or synthetic. The above-mentioned promoter elements function as transcription factor binding sites. Plants or parts of plants containing one SMPER linked to an encoding sequence and enhancing the expression of the coding sequence are claimed.  Methods for selecting promoter elements and for creating SMPERs active in a tissue of interest are also claimed.

Note: Patent information on this page was last updated on 29 March 2006.