Appeal No. 2006-1547 Page 18
Application No. 10/114,668
along with template and polymerase, in a gel volume element, for example by
aerosol, emulsion, or inkjet printer, from an equimolar primer mixture.
According to the examiner, the “ordinary artisan” would have recognized the benefit of
inkjet/pulse-jet deposition “to enable more rapid, automated and higher density array
format,” providing the motivation to have utilized Church’s teaching to deposit the
polymerase which is described in the assays of Kosak, Yu or Ulfendahl.
Appellant argued that Church’s example “does not teach pulse-jet deposition of
polymerase but rather pulse-jet deposition of chemical reagents used in the synthesis of
oligonucleotides.” Appeal Brief, page 22. To support their arguments, they referred to
the Kenney and Rehman citations in ¶ 263 of Church, neither of which disclosed inkjet
deposition of polymerase.
We agree with the examiner that Church discloses pulse-jet deposition of
polymerase. This is expressly stated in plain language in ¶ 263 of Church. It is not
significant that the cited Kenney and Rehman publications do not disclose deposition of
polymerase since, from their position in the paragraph, it is more reasonable to
conclude that their relevance was to the acrydite primer disclosure. (It is noted that
these references were not provided, so an independent assessment of their content
was not made.)
Appellant further argued that to the extent Church is found to disclose inkjet
deposition, the reagents are in a gel volume, “not on a solid support as in the instant
claims and thus polymerase is necessarily dispersed throughout the gel volume
containing the array rather than at discrete locations on an array surface …” Reply
Brief, page 10.
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