Intellectual Property

Cytognomix has a well-maintained portfolio of multiple issued and pending patents covering its intellectual property which it either owns or licenses.

Information theory based binding site analysis. This invention detects and quantifies the strengths of binding sites in nucleic acids. Binding sites are defined based upon the individual information content of a particular site of interest (US Patent 5,867,402). Substitutions within the binding site sequences can be analyzed to determine whether the substitution will cause a deleterious mutation or a benign polymorphism. In addition, new binding sites can be identified using individual information content. Further a computer system is described for determining and displaying individual information content of a binding site sequence. Several software products have been created and distributed based on this technology, including the ASSA server and the Shannon pipeline. The new ASSEDA server (Mucaki et al. in press) extends this technology to define the Total individual information of a set of binding sites that recognize a common functional unit, which, in this instance, is an exon (patent pending).

Single copy technology. As important as the protection, is the fact that the SC technology does not infringe on any patents controlled any other organization. US Patent No. 7,734,424 covers the foundational “abinitio”^TM technology currently used in probe and microarray designs.

US Patent 8,209,129 covers single copy DNA probes which include divergent repetitive sequences, thus significantly extending the portions of the genome that can be used for such probes beyond traditional single copy sequences. The technology also increases the density of genomic DNA probes for higher resolution genetic analysis beyond what is used in FISH, genomic microarrays for array comparative genomic hybridization, and solution capture hybrdization arrays for sequence enrichment in deep sequencing. It is licensed to Cytognomix. Other patents are pending on these unique genomic applications.

Cytognomix’s SC FISH probes are one of several products that come from applications of “Ab-initio” design algorithms. The method depends on finished genome sequences as the raw template for a recursive algorithm that results in “single copy” sequence information and products. The algorithm is elegant and easily applied to any completed genome sequence, limited only by the quality of the input sequences and processing time. The output is in the form of “single copy intervals”, generally varying size from hundreds to thousands of nucleotides. The ab-initio method makes use of parallel computing resources to reduce the time required to identify single copy intervals and distinguish them from repeated sequences.

The ab initio process confers a number of advantages over purely repeat-masked probes, which we previously developed (US Pat. 6,828,097, 7,014,997 and others). The design criteria permit inclusion of highly divergent interspersed repeated sequences that don’t cross-hybridize to other genomic locations. If desired, ab initio probes can optionally exclude segmental duplications and self-chain blocks of low copy sequences capable of cross-hybridizing to undesirable genomic targets.