Monitoramento tecnológico de patentes de produtos e processos aplicados ao monosexo de peixes

Abstract

The world's preference for animal consumption is directed towards fish. Aquaculture in 2018 produced 82.1 million tons of aquatic animals, with fish being the leader in production systems. This production is constantly increasing in the world, especially in developing countries, which guarantees income and nutritional security. Due to social and economic importance, researchers and producers aim to improve and apply several technologies to enhance production. One of them is the monosex of fish, which can be reached in a genotypic and phenotypic way. To protect these technologies and guarantee the exclusivity of commercial exploitation, patent documents are issued and are available in national and international databases, where it is possible to carry out searches and learn about the state of the art of technologies of interest. Thus, the objective of this work was to carry out the technological monitoring of products and processes aimed at sex reversal and obtaining monosex of fish. For this, a search was carried out, through technological monitoring, in the main national and international databases, such as INPI, Espacenet, LATIPAT, and Patent scope. The search was performed using keywords in Portuguese, English, and Spanish. Then, an analysis and filter of the documents were carried out with the inclusion and exclusion criteria adopted. With the patents obtained, they were placed in a table and followed for the analysis of the evaluation criteria. Thus, it could be seen that China, responsible for about 35% of the world's fish production, held 67.9% of the patents found; The temporal evolution took place from 1992 onwards, growing in the 2nd decade of the century. XXI; International technology groups by international patent classification were largely in the areas of human necessities and chemistry (sections A and C); The main applicants were distributed among research institutes and companies showing their profile of great economic production of these patents; The fish families targeted for the various techniques of reversal or obtaining less sex of fish were found, which were 51.3% for endocrine manipulation and the remainder divided for gametic and genomic manipulation. This work allowed us to verify that China continues to be the largest producer of intellectual property in fish farming under its large production rate and that these protections were largely developed at the beginning of the 21st century. 10 techniques for monosex are protected, and more than half of the patents contain, at some stage of the process, the use of endocrine manipulators to obtain the desired result. It is still seen that monitoring was viable to elucidate the roles and technological development of sexual manipulation in fish farming as well as to address new industrial paths for the field.