Well, this was the find of the day.... RRV Patent

[url]https://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1="rose+plant"&OS="rose+plant"&RS="rose+plant"[/url]

Why would they want to patent this?
Genuinely curious, I don’t understand.

Because this technology type hasn’t been improved upon since the 1990s, and with viruses being such a hot topic, TAMU seemed to deem it worthwhile to write, pay for, and publish the patent.

Why? I cannot assume to know how TAMU operated internally, but there are guesses. 1. To protect the usage against a corporation so they can continue to use it as more plant virus works are published. 2. To recoup any project costs incurred. 3. To represent novelty as a university of the sciences. 4. To increase valuation. 5. Because its cool :sweat_smile:

Thanks pacificjade, that makes it much more clear to me!

Here is anothrr possible piece of the equation from TAMU:

Specifically, this: “This reverse genetic system creates new opportunities for studying negative strand RNA viruses infecting plants.”

In other words, beyond roses and also to crops worth far more than roses ever will be, especially if you consider food and agribusiness as a whole.

I think, also, due to the coof-demic (Covid 19), scientific interest in viruses have skyrocketed, and any understanding and potential byproduct intellectual property from that interest are potential gold mines.

All these directions discussed and in the links sound very interesting. I may be misunderstanding something, but specifically for a practical application towards RRD it sounds helpful. From my understanding the technology would be helpful to more reliably test how roses that may be resistant to RRD work with and fight back against aspects of the virus. It would take away the mite component and specifically allow people to more directly understand how the plant deals with the virus and components of what the virus codes for once it is inside.

An additional factor in patenting gene sequences is to control their use, for instance in making reverse transcripts as guide RNA for CRISPR, or miRNA or other things that go by various names seem to work in plants for gene silencing. You could imagine taking advantage of portions of the gene sequence for PCR in detection studies,for instance as David Z. mentioned, and for different kinds of interference with the replication of the virus. The owner of the intellectual property might be able to collect a small royalty on every use of the sequence that they determined, or technology based on it for enhancing the plant immune system. It may be that deeply buried in the patent there is speculation on all of this and claims to have rights to all of them because of having the original critical sequence that is needed to make the new “pharmaceuticals” for plants. The University of PA may end up with more than a billion dollars in royalties for its basic science on messenger RNA technologies, as eventually applied to the Covid system. Not that plants like roses will earn anything like this, but some major virus in some major crop could do so. Universities are willing to spend some significant money gambling that one out of 10 (or 100)of their patents will prove of real value.

What are the consequences for breeding?

It seems pretty straightforward that their interest is in the virulence, for which there can be multiple possible uses such as making cloning vectors, delivering genetic payloads, targeting specific tissues for engineering purposes and the like. Think of it as a less generalized, more precise Agrobacter.

In particular, disclosed herein is an infectious clone of Rose rosette virus (RRV). This method can in some embodiments be used to prepare infectious clones of any species within the Fimoviridae family

I work in the rose breeding lab here at TAMU and we are studying the RRD/RRV resistance. As you can read in these two recently published papers, our lab needed roughly 3 years of in field phenotyping to determine which individuals in the populations were resistant or susceptible. This patent you found was from a colaborator lab at TAMU that is focused on finding a more time efficient and labor efficient way we can screen materials in our breeding program for viral resistance. The goal is to create infectious clones that will allow us to innoculate a greenhouse full of seedlings and then PCR test the plants for presence of the virus a couple months later in stead of 3 year field trials. Greenhouse screening greatly reduces the cost of our studies as a lot of money is spent field trials for the maintenance of plants. In short they are patenting a way to potentially quickly screening progeny for resistance.

Our two papers are below and open access.

Frontiers | Rose Rosette Disease Resistance Loci Detected in Two Interconnected Tetraploid Garden Rose Populations and Pathogens | Free Full-Text | Identification of QTLs for Reduced Susceptibility to Rose Rosette Disease in Diploid Roses

Let me know if yall have any questions about this,

Jeekin