The ranked assignee list covers 80 companies across 185 records, with the leading assignee holding 29 records compared with 10 at fifth place and 7 at tenth. That gap shows one organisation well ahead of the field, but the top ten together only account for 68.1% of all records, so a broad second tier of institutions and companies also holds meaningful claim positions. Anyone doing competitive tracking should watch both the leader and the cluster immediately behind it, since the gap between positions two through ten is much narrower than the gap to first place.

Filing rose from 4 records in 2017 to a peak of 21 in 2021, then fell to 7 by 2024, a -67% change over that three-year span. Because patent publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, the 2025-26 figures in any dataset are still incomplete and should not be read as confirmation of further decline. The safest reading is that the field went through a concentrated filing wave around 2020-2021 and has since returned to a lower, steadier baseline through the last complete year of data.

Almost all records, 99.5% of the 185 in scope, fall under C12N covering microorganisms and genetic engineering, since that is where the core transformation methods are classified. C07K, peptides and proteins, appears in 66.5% of records, reflecting the recombinant protein output side of the technology. Smaller but notable overlaps appear in A01H (plant breeding, 44.3%), A61K (medicinal preparations, 29.7%) and thinner classes like A61P (therapeutic activity, 10.3%), which is useful for scoping a search or an FTO review by relevance rather than by keyword alone.

US20050044593A1, assigned to Biolex, Inc. and published in 2005, covers methods and compositions for transforming duckweed plastids, including transplastomic duckweed cells and plants and the nucleic acid constructs used to build them. It is one of the more heavily cited records in this dataset, which signals that later filers frequently drafted around or cited its plastid-transformation approach rather than that it single-handedly forecloses the field. Anyone building on a duckweed or related aquatic-plant expression platform should review it directly rather than relying on citation count alone, since scope depends on the granted claims, not the abstract.

The class-level data points to therapeutic-activity formulation claims (A61P, 10.3% of records) and fermentation or enzymatic scale-up claims (C12P, 17.3%) as comparatively thin relative to the dense core transformation and protein-expression claims in C12N and C07K. Host-organism diversity beyond the most litigated platforms, and glycosylation or post-translational control specific to plastid expression, also show less filing density in the underlying records. These are read from where filing density is lower, not from any confirmed absence of prior art, so a targeted novelty search on the specific claim language is still the necessary next step before drafting.