Given the exceptional circumstances and the heavy disruption caused by the COVID-19 crisis across the EU, the President of the CPVO has taken the decision to extend deadlines that fall in the period 17 March – 3 May included, until 4 May 2020 for parties to proceedings before the CPVO and the Board of Appeal.
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The IMODDUS Working Group of CPVO
European Seed (ES): Recently there have been regular discussions about the use of biomolecular techniques in the testing of Distinctness, Uniformity and Stability (DUS), which are prerequisites for plant variety rights. Why is it necessary to add these techniques to the toolbox of the DUS examiner?
Anne Weitz (AW): CPVO has the firm conviction that biomolecular techniques could help to improve quality and efficiency in DUS testing and provide useful tools for the enforcement of plant breeders’ rights. One of the main concerns of the CPVO is the number of varieties of common knowledge to be grown in such trials, which can for some species, include more than 1,000 plots. Varieties which are potentially similar to the candidate variety, have to be grown side by side in the trial that determines Distinctness, Uniformity and Stability (DUS) of the new variety. To ensure that the cost for acquiring a Community Plant Variety Right (CPVR) is kept at a reasonable level, there is an interest to reduce the number of varieties grown in DUS trials. Observing the extent of the currently available biomolecular techniques and how these are already used in DUS testing, one will see that they are mostly used for management of the reference collections with the purpose to exclude more varieties that need to be grown alongside candidate varieties. [...]
Read complete article published on European Seed Website, Vol. 4, Issue 3 here