The USPTO’s group art unit 1661 handles plant patent applications. US plant patents are allocated one of two kind codes: P2 or P3; depending on whether the application from which the patent issued underwent pre-grant publication (P3) or not (P2).
The USPTO’s bibliographic patent data contains a wealth of information for plant patents, including the botanical denomination (i.e. Latin name) of the genus and species of the patented plant; and the plant variety designation (i.e. cultivar name) of the patented plant. For example, US plant patent PP23241 issued on 4 December 2012 for a plant having the botanical denomination Echinacea purpurea and variety designation "Quills and Thrills". According to the patent’s abstract, the plant is "characterized by large inflorescences with quilled ray florets of purple pink, a compact, multicrown habit, a long bloom time, and excellent vigor".
It’s relatively straightforward to feed bibliographic data of this sort directly from a visualization tool into a search engine, to obtain further information. For example, the botanical denomination or the variety designation can be fed into a search engine directly off the visualization to get an image of the plant—as seen here for "Quills and Thrills".
As further examples, either the botanical denomination or the variety designation can be fed into a search engine directly off the visualization to lookup the corresponding plant patent(s) in the Google patents database, or to see if the botantical denomination appears in The Plant List—as seen here for Echinacea purpurea—etc.Click the "Plant Patents" tab above to explore these and other aspects of the USPTO’s 2012 plant patents.
