navigating the patent maze

Free resources for searching nucleotide and amino acid sequences in patent documents are scarce. Two resources are PatentLens and Patome@Korea. PatentLens will be reviewed in a separate posting.

Patome@Korea is newly launched. The database contains biological sequences obtained from Korean Patent Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) and from KRIBB (Korea Research Institute of Bioscience & Biotechnology), a research institute and Center of Excellence for national biotechnology R&D. Data

The main search page allows queries for patent or publication no., keywords in title, and accession numbers. Results are presented as a list of patent documents that contain the sequence data. A second type of search if for patent information related to genes. A gene-related query, such as gene ID, gene name or RefSeq number will display sequence data associated with the query terms.

BLAST searches can be performed as well. Two different entry pages separate programs for searching protein and nucleotide data. In addition to searching the entire data set, data from Korean patents and applications can be specifically searched.

The site and information about the data isn’t terribly easy to navigate, so it might take some time browsing around to find what you want.

*see also: Lee et al., “Patome: a database server for biological sequence annotation and analysis in issued patents and published patent applications.” Nucleic Acids Res 35:D47-D50, 2007. (link)