Appeal No. 2006-3105
Application No. 09/397,494
Examiner has additionally relied upon the teachings of Dehlinger as we have addressed
above and do not find that Appellants have shown error in this combination. The
Examiner’s reliance upon the teachings of Wong with respect to having a more flexible
and user friendly interface for set up and display seems to be an obvious improvement in
the interface of Layne. While we find that Layne alone teaches the recited limitations,
we find the Examiner’s reliance upon the express teachings of Wong to more clearly
teach and suggest the interface that we find suggested in Layne at col. 11, ll. 39-46 to be
well founded. Therefore, Appellants' argument is not persuasive.
In the Reply Brief at pages 6-7, Appellants again reiterate the argument that it
would have been obvious to one skilled in the art at the time of the invention to have
combined the teachings of the references applied. Again, we do not find this argument
persuasive, as discussed above.
Since Appellants have not shown error in the Examiner’s prima facie case of
obviousness, we will sustain the rejection of independent claim 32 and the claims
grouped therewith.
With respect to independent claim 26 and the combination of McCasky Feazel
and Layne, Appellants maintain that Layne does not provide any teaching or suggestion
of communicating data from a probe array experiment over a computer network and
Layne is limited to conventional robotic microtiter experimental techniques. As
discussed above, we find no express limitation in independent claim 26 to distinguish
over Layne and Appellants have not identified any express definition in the specification
which would distinguish over the conventional robotic microtiter experiment results
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