International patent families: from application strategies to statistical indicators

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of international patent families, including their domestic component. We exploit a relatively under-studied feature of patent families, namely the number of patents covering the same invention within a given jurisdiction. Using this information, we highlight common patterns in the structure of international patent families, which reflect both the patenting strategies of innovators and the peculiarities of the different patent systems. While the literature has extensively used family size, i.e. the number of countries in which a given invention is protected, as a measure of patent value, our results suggest that the number of patent filings in the priority country within a patent family as well as the timespan between the first and last fillings within a family are other insightful indicators of the value of patented innovations

Structural basis for Mep2 ammonium transceptor activation by phosphorylation

Mep2 proteins are fungal transceptors that play an important role as ammonium sensors in fungal development. Mep2 activity is tightly regulated by phosphorylation, but how this is achieved at the molecular level is not clear. Here we report X-ray crystal structures of the Mep2 orthologues from Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Candida albicans and show that under nitrogen-sufficient conditions the transporters are not phosphorylated and present in closed, inactive conformations. Relative to the open bacterial ammonium transporters, non-phosphorylated Mep2 exhibits shifts in cytoplasmic loops and the C-terminal region (CTR) to occlude the cytoplasmic exit of the channel and to interact with His2 of the twin-His motif. The phosphorylation site in the CTR is solvent accessible and located in a negatively charged pocket ∼30 Å away from the channel exit. The crystal structure of phosphorylation-mimicking Mep2 variants from C. albicans show large conformational changes in a conserved and functionally important region of the CTR. The results allow us to propose a model for regulation of eukaryotic ammonium transport by phosphorylation

Systematic Mutational Analysis of the Intracellular Regions of Yeast Gap1 Permease

The yeast general amino acid permease Gap1 is a convenient model for studying the intracellular trafficking of membrane proteins. Present at the plasma membrane when the nitrogen source is poor, it undergoes ubiquitin-dependent endocytosis and degradation upon addition of a good nitrogen source, e.g. ammonium. It comprises 12 transmembrane domains (TM) flanked by cytosol-facing N- and C-terminal tails (NT, CT). The NT of Gap1 contains the acceptor lysines for ubiquitylation and its CT includes a sequence essential to exit from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER).Journal ArticleResearch Support, Non-U.S. Gov'tSCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Filing strategies and patent value

This article contributes to the literature on the determinants of patent value in two ways. First, it introduces a new potential class of value determinants in the form of filing strategies (including filing routes, drafting styles and divisional filings). Second, it provides empirical evidence based on a unique dataset of about 250,000 EPO patents that these strategies are consistently and positively associated with patent value, indicated by six different measures based on citations, families, renewals and oppositions.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/inPres

Quality control in antimicrobial disk susceptibility testing: a Belgian multicenter study

A Belgian multicenter trial was conducted to evaluate problems encountered with quality control results of antimicrobial disk susceptibility testing and to compare the performance of BBL disks and Rosco tablets. Over a period of four weeks 18 laboratories daily tested three reference strains against eight antibiotics. A standardised method was used by all participants. For all results together 10.4 % and 7.3 % of the measurements with BBL disks and Rosco tablets, respectively, were outside the recommended range. Major problems were observed for some specific strain-antibiotic combinations. Standard deviations were similar for both systems; their precision was comparable. The results suggest that cooperation between manufacturers and some reference laboratories could be improved in order to establish optimal quality control limits