DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Election/Restrictions
Applicant’s election without traverse of Group I (claims 1-16) ad species agent (g) in the reply filed on 05/07/2026 is acknowledged. No prior art has been found for elected species. The examination has been extended to all species.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claim 13 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Claim 13 recites the limitation "the purifying step" in line 1. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Closest prior art
Velema et al., Nat. Rev. Chem. 4, 22-37 (2020).
Velema et al. discloses RNA crosslinking through reversible bis-acylation (see Figure 1). However, Velema et does not teach:
digesting the one or more crosslinked RNA pairs with an endoribonuclease enzyme;
removing nucleotides from a 3'-end of each of the first RNA strand and the second RNA
strand of the one or more crosslinked RNA pairs using an exoribonuclease enzyme;
ligating the first RNA strand to the second RNA strand to form one or more contiguous
RNA molecules;
reversing the crosslinking of the one or more contiguous RNA molecules to form bipartite RNA molecules;
sequencing a cDNA library comprising cDNA sequences of each of the bipartite RNA
molecules to provide a plurality of sequence reads;
aligning gapped sequence reads from the plurality of sequence reads into sequence cluster alignments, wherein each of the sequence cluster alignments is aligned based on a specific pair of reference nucleotides, wherein a gap in the aligned gapped sequence reads correspond to the nucleotides removed from the 3'-end of each the first RNA strand and the second RNA strand;
identifying two nucleotides at the crosslinking site based on a fixed distance from the gap of the aligned gapped sequence reads; and
determining the spatial distance between the two nucleotides based on a length of the
SHARC agent.
Claims 1-12 and 14-16 are allowed.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JEZIA RILEY whose telephone number is (571)272-0786. The examiner can normally be reached 7:30-6:00pm.
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/JEZIA RILEY/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 1681 26 June 2026
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