Interference 103,781
that . . . we were going to pin down the region of the gene
that should be fixed first. And as soon as that was
available - I mean, if we had pinned down a region, that
would have moved the timeline to a much earlier time upon
when we could commence sort of gene construction and
actually using the codon usage tables for our purposes.
Q. What kind of region were you looking for that
could be most easily fixed?
A. Well, we were looking for a region that caused
RNA instability.
Q. This would be separate and apart from the absence
of plant-preferred codons?
THE WITNESS: I think our search for the region of
- regions of causing, causing RNA instability, yeah, was
somewhat distinct from the codon usage at that point.
We focused, for example, on the region at 1.7 KB because
that’s where we knew the RNA was truncated that we’d
seen in Bt plants. So we had some physical evidence
there that by itself would help us to target that region
as identifying a region of instability.
Having testified that the “search for the region . . .
causing RNA instability . . . was somewhat distinct from codon
usage” (AR 0110, l. 22-25), Dr. Adang’s description of “what type
of work was done to define that region” (AR 0111, l. 12-13) is
significant to our consideration of whether or not Adang
exercised reasonable diligence toward reducing the invention of
Claim 1 of Adang’s involved patent, and thus Count 2 of this
interference, to practice.
Claim 1 of Adang’s involved U.S. Patent 5,380,831 includes
the step of “modifying a portion of said coding sequence [of a Bt
gene which encodes an insecticidal protein toxin] to yield a
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