ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 20 -- United States Patent no. 12,391,963, issued on Aug. 19, was assigned to PLANT BIOSCIENCE Ltd. (Norwich, Great Britain).

"Metabolic engineering" was invented by Anne Osbourn (Norwich, Great Britain) and James Reed (Norwich, Great Britain).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The invention relates generally to materials and methods for biosynthesising quillaic acid in a host by expressing heterologous nucleotide sequences in the host each of which encodes a polypeptide which in combination have said QA biosynthesis activity. Example polypeptides include (i) a Beta-amyrin synthase; (ii) an enzyme capable of oxidising Beta-amyrin or an oxidised derivative thereof at the C-28 ...