Appeal No. 1996-1093
Application No. 07/300,357
In the Examiner’s Answer (Paper No. 32, mailed October 3, 1994) the examiner withdrew all
grounds of rejection as they appear in the Final Office Action, in view of a new ground of rejection.
Claims 11, 12, and 44-55 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103. As evidence of obviousness, the
examiner relies upon Muller, Scripture, Perron, Waye and Maniatis. We reverse.
DISCUSSION
In reaching our decision in this appeal, we have given careful consideration to the appellants’
specification and claims, and to the respective positions articulated by the appellants and the examiner.
We make reference to the Examiner’s Answer, and the Supplemental Examiner’s Answer (Paper No.
37, mailed June 3, 1995) for the examiner’s reasoning in support of the rejection. We further reference
appellants’ Brief (Paper No. 31, filed July 5, 1994), and appellants’ Reply Brief (Paper No. 33, filed
January 5, 1995) for the appellants’ arguments in favor of patentability.
At pages 3-4 of the Examiner’s Answer, the examiner states that “Muller teaches an expression
vector containing the promoter/operator, initiation region, and signal sequence of the mglB gene from
Salmonella typhimurium.” At page 4 of the Examiner’s Answer, the examiner states that “Scripture
teaches the cloning and sequencing of the E.coli mglB gene and delineates the initiation region and signal
sequence.” At page 4 of the Examiner’s Answer the examiner notes that “[t]he prior art does not
explicitly teach the nucleotide sequence encoding the promoter/operator region of the mglB gene from
E. coli or S. typhimurium [sic, St.], and its insertion into an M13 vector containing a polylinker . . .
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