Diversa Granted a U.S. Patent for Combining Discovery and Evolution of Proteins from the Environment

20th patent issued year-to-date brings total number of issued patents to 192

15-Oct-2004

San Diego. Diversa Corporation has been issued a new patent that is directed to tools used in the company's core business of the discovery of genes from all types of environments and the evolution of those genes into highly customized protein products for the agricultural, chemical, industrial, and pharmaceutical industries, company officials announced today. The issued patent represents a significant achievement for Diversa, which over the past 10 years has been pioneering the technologies needed to identify large families of related genes from a broad range of environments and then enhance the function of those genes though the creation of mutations to produce optimized proteins. Specifically the patent includes claims directed to Diversa's proprietary discovery and evolution tools, which are the key platforms for Diversa's business.

"This has been a remarkable year for our company. The new patent on our core science validates years of hard work and supports how truly powerful our discovery and evolution tools have become for biotechnology," stated Jay M. Short, Ph.D., Diversa's President and Chief Executive Officer.

Over the past 10 years, Diversa scientists have developed molecular tools to capture and recover nearly 100 percent of the DNA from microorganisms residing in samples of soil, air, water, plants, and animals in different environments throughout the world. The company has created more than 2,500 metagenomic libraries comprising millions of genomes using the patented method. Standard techniques for discovering microorganisms in environmental samples are able to find only the microbes that are able to grow in culture, which often represent less than one percent of the microbial species that are present.

Meanwhile, Diversa also has been developing and perfecting unique methods of evolving the genes discovered in these environmental samples. Every gene represents a potential novel enzyme that might be useful for making new drugs or streamlining the manufacturing of a host of new industrial products. Company scientists are then able to search for changes in the enzymes that may have specific traits desired by industry partners.

Diversa's discovery and evolution technologies have been successfully used to develop numerous products and to form partnerships with market leaders. So far this year, Diversa has been issued 20 worldwide patents covering different aspects of the discovery and evolution technologies. Diversa's total patent portfolio consists of 192 issued patents and more than 500 pending patents.

Technical language of U.S. Patent 6,790,605

The new patent includes the following key claim: "A method for identifying a protein having a desired activity, the method comprising: (a) constructing a DNA library from unselected DNA molecules obtained directly from an environmental source; (b) subjecting the library to mutagenesis; (c) expressing the DNA molecules of the mutagenized library to produce proteins; and (d) screening the proteins produced in (c) to identify one or more protein(s) with the desired activity."

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