Appeal No. 1998-1720
Application No. 08/384,239
This is a decision on appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134 from the final rejection of claims
2 and 5 through 11, all the claims remaining in the application.
Claims 9, 10 and 11 are representative and read as follows:
9. A powdered or granulated enzyme preparation, free of surface active agents,
consisting of 80 to 99.9 percent by weight of at least one salt, otherwise conventionally
used as a diluent, the remainder being a protease, present in the preparation in inactive
form in a tannin complex from which it is released in active form by the salt when the
preparation is dissolved in water.
10. In a method of soaking hides in a soaking float in the presence of a proteolytic
enzyme, the improvement wherein the enzyme is added to the soaking float as the enzyme
preparation of Claim 9 to give a proteolytic activity from 10000 to 30000 Löhlein-Volhard
units per liter of soaking float.
11. In a method of bating hides in bate liquor in the presence of a proteolytic
enzyme, the improvement wherein the enzyme is added to the bate liquor as the enzyme
preparation of claim 9 to give a proteolytic activity from 5000 to 20000 Löhlein-Volhard
units per liter of bate liquor.
The references relied on by the examiner are as follows:
Green et al. (Green) 4,009,076 Feb. 22, 1977
Borello 4,087,368 May 2, 1978
Tang et al. (Tang) 4,266,031 May 5, 1981
German Patent Spec. (Thomas) 0,128,419 Feb. 7, 1902
German Patent Spec. (Grimm I) 0,975,095 Jul. 20, 1956
German Patent Spec. (Grimm II) 0,974,813 Apr. 13, 1961
German Patent Spec. (Grimm III) 0,976,107 Feb. 7, 1963
British Patent Spec. (Töpfer) 1,156,900 Jul. 2, 1969
German Patent Spec. (Geyer) 2,143,945 Mar. 8, 19731
1According to appellants, “[t]he German patents discussed hereinafter were
brought to the Examiner’s attention by the appellants in the Information Disclosure
Statement filed January 6, 1992 in a prior application 07/783,901, now abandoned,” which
“Statement contains translations of the relevant content of these patents.” Brief, page 3. It
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