Biotech patents and their pitfalls: Names-for-Life adds value to your biology searches

During last month’s annual PIUG meeting, it was my good fortune to see a presentation from George Garrity, Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Michigan State University and a co-founder of NamesforLife, LLC.   From George I learned about an important challenge affecting searchers of biological information: rapidly changing organism names.

This is an exciting time to be a biologist, as new knowledge is rapidly being discovered through DNA sequencing technology.   But one downside is that a fast-moving field means a quickly changing taxonomy: as bacterial strains are differentiated from one another, their specific names frequently evolve.  I was astonished to learn that the list of validly published names of Bacteria and Archaea changes about 15 times a week, and informal or trivial names are created and enter into the literature at a rate of approximately 100-150 times/day.  Read on to discover how these challenges impact the patent field, and how the Names-for-Life technology is designed to help.

IEEE Xplore Updated – Electrical and Computing Literature

There’s a lot to catch up on in the world of patent and prior art searching. Putting aside all the developments in US Patent Reform legislation (which can and probably should be it’s own post when it’s all set in stone), there’s plenty to learn about the search systems and databases you know, love, and have come to rely on. If you read on, you’ll find out about changes to IEEE Xplore–a great source of journal and conference non-patent literature–with more to come soon!