One assignee leads clearly with 1,010 of the 6,161 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-place assignee at 155 and tenth place at 91. Much of that leader’s volume traces to a small cluster of co-filed records with named individual inventors, visible in the strongest co-assignee pairings in the dataset. Together the top five assignees hold 31.5% of all records, so while there is a clear leader, the majority of filings still come from a long tail of smaller players.

Filing peaked in 2018 at 261 records and has declined since, with a 43% drop from 137 records in 2021 to 78 in 2024 — the most recent year that can be treated as complete. Figures for 2025 and 2026 look lower still, but that reflects publication lag of roughly 18 months rather than an actual collapse in filing activity. Read the 2021-to-2024 window as the reliable signal, not the raw tail end of the chart.

US20220002661A1, assigned to Danstar Ferment AG and published 2022-01-06, covers recombinant yeast host cells engineered to increase formate production relative to a native strain, combined with a source of formate dehydrogenase activity that can be internal or externally supplied during fermentation. It is a fermentation-performance patent layered on top of host-cell engineering rather than a claim over integration mechanics themselves. Anyone modifying yeast formate metabolism for fermentation should review its specific claim language before designing a similar pathway.