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of the database is 27,251 hits, which means that a lot of hits fall in more than one organism-group. After deletion of family members, 10,837 hits remain. After screening the patents concerning false positive results, 1774 patents remain. This 2nd screening was done manually: every patent was evaluated at least by considering the abstract, but mostly by screening the full text of a patent. There are several reasons for the immense reduction of patents, such as topics, that are dealing with marine organisms, but do not belong to Blue Biotechnology. This included some obviously wrong results, because the keywords fit randomly (e.g. recipes with fish and pasta, cooked in salt water) as well as truncational problems (e.g. the “mariner Transposon”: mariner-like elements as a prominent class of transposons found in multiple species including humans - the Mariner transposon was first discovered by Jacobson and Hartl in Drosophila). Other examples were classical aquaculture topics that do not belong to marine biotechnology, e.g. inventions of new cages for marine fishes. All these results comprise only patents with European patent owners and inventors, which distribute across topics of marine biotechnology as follows: Topics Energy Cosmetics Drugs Enzymes Natural products Biofilms Biocides Residual 93 713 1204 942 1756 10 46 1 5200 Most of the patents can fall into more than one group, thus the sum of all hits (5200) was far higher than the real amounts of patents (1774). Time-dependent course of patenting The first visible patenting in marine biotechnology occurred in the 1990s. The amount of patents before is negligible. This is in accordance to other publications. Hu et al (Marine Drugs 2011, 9, 514-525), for example, published the worldwide development of marine natural products with a tremendous increase between 1984 and 1986. Therefore the patents until 1985 in the following analyses were only counted in 10-year periods. 100 Study in support of Impact Assessment work on Blue Biotechnology

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