US Patent Issued to NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, IWATE UNIVERSITY on June 10 for "Modified channel rhodopsin" (Japanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 18 -- United States Patent no. 12,325,729, issued on June 10, was assigned to NATIONAL UNIVERSITY CORPORATION, IWATE UNIVERSITY (Morioka, Japan).

"Modified channel rhodopsin" was invented by Hiroshi Tomita (Morioka, Japan), Eriko Sugano (Morioka, Japan), Kitako Tabata (Morioka, Japan) and Yoshito Watanabe (Morioka, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An object of the present invention is to provide a modified channel rhodopsin capable of opening and closing an ion channel by irradiation with light at different wavelengths, and/or having high ion permeability (photoreactivity). The solution is to substitute a C-terminal region of a channel rhodopsin obtained by substitut...