Dive Brief:
- The University of California-Davis has filed a lawsuit against the California Strawberry Commission as a battle over the nation's breeding stock of strawberry plants escalates.
- The University wants the court to rule that it is the sole owner of the "germplasm," the roughly 1,500 plants that form the core of the nation's strawberry breeding efforts.
- The lawsuit comes roughly two years after the commission sued the university after two leading researchers left UC-Davis to start a private company using the same germplasm.
Dive Insight:
If there's a precedent for this sort of thing - where roughly 80 of a nation's fruit crop can be traced back to some 1,500 plants that were held in the public interest by a university, and then handed over to private interests - we don't know about it. Here's hoping this is resolved soon.