Patent column from DDBJ

Quote from Mail Magazine : No.62&63 (Sep.02,2011) ～ No.71&72 (Jul.26,2012) and April 2013 Issue.
*Please note about different of last information.

Hideo Aono (DDBJ Patent Annotator)

1. Patent data distribution for Japan Patent Office (JPO)

1. Introduction

In this column, I would like to introduce about patent data exchange in the International Nucleotide Sequence Databases (INSD) and Japan Patent Office (JPO) data.

2. Data distribution from INSD

DDBJ is constructing INSD with EMBL-Bank in EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute) and GenBank in NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information).
INSD distributes not only scientific data but also patent data transferring from each patent office as follows.

• Japan： Japan patent office (JPO) → DDBJ
• South Korea： Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) → DDBJ
• USA： United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) → GenBank
• Europe： European Patent Office (EPO) → EMBL-Bank

Patent data contains nucleotide sequence and amino acid sequence. After distributed nucleotide sequence data, it was exchanged among INSD. However, INSD does not exchanged amino acid data.
DDBJ distributes JPO and KIPO amino acid data on DDBJ anonymous FTP site.

DDBJ anonymous FTP:
JPO file: jpo_ddbj_aa*.seq.gz (*=file number)
KIPO file: kipo_ddbj_aa.seq.gz

3. Patent data summary for JPO

3-1) JPO data

DDBJ distributes nucleotide sequence and amino acid data containing publication of unexamined patent applications. Therefore, new distribution sequences do not have the patent right. When you would like to confirm the progression status of patent examination, you need checking the registration status using by retrieval site for (Industrial Property Digital Library) in Japan.

3-2) Kinds of JPO patent data and distribution frequency

DDBJ receives three kind of patent data from JPO;

1. Publication of patent applications
2. International application published under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT)
3. Japanese translations of PCT international publication for patent applications

DDBJ distributes the regular data at once a month and infrequently irregular data in some cases.

3-3) Patent data contents

JPO data of DDBJ flat file (FF) has enough information such as the front page of patent publication by the following contents; sequence, organism name, invention title, applicant name(s), inventor name(s), publication number, publication date, application number, application date, priority date, comment and sequence’s feature information.

Example: DL000001

3-4) Patent applied sequence submission to DDBJ

If you have sequence(s) for patent application, you do not have to submit to DDBJ. Because JPO transfers those sequences to DDBJ and your sequence(s) will be opened to the public through DDBJ. However, if you need the accession number to submit a paper before apply for a patent, you should care since sequence becomes public knowledge in case of released from DDBJ. In this case, please confirm to JPO before your submission.

4. Author comments

I hope to help understanding about JPO patent data. I will introduce about KIPO data and retrieval method of patent sequence in KIPO related organization at next column.

2. Patent data distribution for Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO)

1. Introduction

In previous column, I introduced about patent data for Japan Patent Office (JPO). In this column, I would like to introduce about patent data of Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) and data search service in DDBJ.
DDBJ has just distributed some of KIPO data. Therefore, I would like to introduce also search service of patent applied sequence at Korean Bioinformation Center (KOBIC) and Korea Intellectual Property Rights Information Service (KIPRIS) as KIPO related organization.

2. Summary of KIPO data

DDBJ has provided the nucleotide sequence and amino acid sequence containing publication of unexamined patent applications from KIPO since March 2008.

KIPO data is transferred to DDBJ as follows;

1. KIPO sends the patent sequence data to KOBIC.
2. By cooperation of Dr. Byungwook Lee in KOBIC, KIPO submission files are made by him and transferred from KOBIC to DDBJ.
3. DDBJ exchanges the data format and distributes KIPO data.

DDBJ distributed the following 282,161 entries assigned the prefix “DI” of KIPO accession number, until now.
KIPO data submission is suspended by the problem of submission format from April 2009. Therefore DDBJ is discussing about efficient method for data exchange with KOBIC and KIPO.

Nucleotide sequence data : DI000001 - DI168562 (168,562 entries)
Amino acid sequence data : DI500001 - DI613599 (113,599 entries)

Please see Data example of Fig.1 and Fig.2.

3. Data search for KIPO data

DDBJ

DDBJ provides the search service for KIPO nucleotide and amino acid sequence (Table.1).

Korean Bioinformation Center (KOBIC)

PATOME@Korea is Koran patent database for nucleotide and amino acid sequence in KOBIC. “PatSeq DB search” can search by application number, applicant name, invention title in English. In addition, PATOME@Korea provides the similarity search for DNA and protein against patent applied sequences in Korea (Please see Fig.3).

Korea Intellectual Property Rights Information Service (KIPRIS)

KIPRIS is the search system of Korean patent publication. PATOME@Korea can search the patent publication in Korean. In contrast, KPA (Korean Patent Abstracts) search of KIPRIS can refer the front page and abstract of patent publication in English retrieved by keyword, application number, publication number, applicant name and inventor name (Please see Fig.4). K2E-PAT (Korean to English Patent Automatic Translation) has pay service for the provision of full text by English machine translation.

Author comments

KIPO suspends their submission to DDBJ. We will restart KIPO submission as soon as possible.
At next column, I will introduce about the structure of DDBJ Flat Files (FF) for JPO patent data.

3. Flat File structure for Japan Patent Office (JPO) -First part-

1. Introduction

I introduced about patent data of Japan Patent Office (JPO) in first column and Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) in second column. In this time, I would like to explain about Flat File (FF) structure for JPO nucleotide and amino acid sequence data as two parts. I will introduce about JPO data property, summary of FF structure and relationship between patent application contents and description part on FF in first part.

2. Property of JPO data FF

JPO data FF has fundamental application information of patent publication compared with FF for United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and European Patent Office (EPO). Because JPO makes the submission file (Fig. 1) containing application information based on WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) ST 25 format submitted from applicants. Thereafter, DDBJ makes FF reflected almost contents of JPO submission file (Fig. 2).

3. FF structure and description contents

I showed FF structure for nucleotide sequence data dividing by six parts (LOCUS Block, SOURCE Block, REFERENCE Block, COMMENT Block, Feature Block and Sequence Block) as different color with sample data and description contents in Fig. 2.

Each Block name of symbol alphabet is as follows;
[A] LOCUS Block, [B] SOURCE Block, [C] REFERENCE Block, [D] COMMENT Block, [E] Feature Block, [F] Sequence Block

4. Patent application contents on FF

I showed correspondence relationship between patent application contents and description parts on JPO FF (Table. 1).

Table. 1 Application contents and description parts on JPO FF
* Alphabet symbol after line name is corresponding to FF Block part in Fig. 2.

Patent application information is described mainly at [C] REFERENCE Block and [D] COMMENT Block. Amino acid sequence data is also described on same Blocks. Invention title is set on both DEFINITION line of [A] LOCUS Bloc and TITLE line of [C] REFERENCE Block.
In specially, applicants name is only set JOURNAL line on [C] REFERENCE Block (Fig. 3).

5. Author comments

At second part, I will explain each line description of six Blocks in detail. Moreover, I would like to introduce the conversion process of organism name from JPO submission file in DDBJ.

4. Flat File structure for Japan Patent Office (JPO) -Second part-

1. Introduction

I described about summary of Flat File (FF) structure of Japan Patent Office (JPO) in previous column at first part. In second part, I will introduce FF structure in more detail, conversion process of organism name from JPO submission file and the format of Patent publication number.

2. FF structure and description contents

I showed FF structure for nucleotide sequence data dividing by six parts ([A] LOCUS Block, [B] SOURCE Block, [C] REFERENCE Block, [D] COMMENT Block, [E] Feature Block and [F] Sequence Block) as different color with sample data and description contents in Fig. 1.

2-1) [A] LOCUS Block

LOCUS Block has LOCUS, DEFINITION, ACCESSION, VERSION and KEYWORDS line (Table. 1).

Table. 1: Description Contents of LOCUS Block

In case of amino acid sequence data, LOCUS line has the different output format (Fig.2). Its line has Accession number, Sequence length number, Molecule type, Division and Last release date.

2-2) [B] SOURCE Block

Scientific name on SOURCE and ORGANISM lines is converted from NCBI Taxonomy Database (Table. 2). Please also refer at section (2).

Table. 2: Description Contents of SOURCE Block

2-3) [C] REFERENCE Block

REFERENCE Block has AUTHORS, TITLE and JOURNAL line (Table. 3).

Table. 3: Description Contents of REFERENCE Block

2-4)[D] COMMENT Block

Table. 4: Description Contents of COMMENT Block
*Some old JPO data have PC line for description of international patent classification (IPC) code.

2-5) [E] Feature Block

JPO data has only source feature, same also Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) data (Table. 5).
Nucleic acid sequence data has /mol_type, /db_xref and /organism qualifiers.
Amino acid sequence data does not have /db_xref qualifier.

Table. 5: Description Contents of Feature Block

(Organism information update based on NCBI Taxonomy Database)
DDBJ started adding Taxonomy ID of /db_xref to JPO and KIPO data from May 2010. DDBJ will update the reconstruction of SOURCE line, ORGANIS line and /organism based Taxonomy ID, once a year.

2-6) [F] Sequence Block

Nucleotide sequence data has BASE COUNT line (Fig.1) which is described the number of adenine (a), cytosine (c), guanine (g), thymine (t).
In case of Amino acid sequence data, BASE COUNT line is not output (Fig.3).

3. Conversion process of scientific name

3-1) Conversion of scientific name from JPO submission file

Original organism name in JPO submission file is described on OS line of COMMENT Block. Scientific name is converted from its name on OS line and set to SOURCE line, ORGANISM line and /organism qualifier based on NCBI Taxonomy database. Its lineage information is also constructed and set on ORGANISM line.

3-2) Unidentified organism name

In case of organism name described by applicants is not found in NCBI Taxonomy database, its name is converted to “unidentified” on SOURCE line, ORGANISM line and /organism qualifier (Fig.4).
Original organism name described by applicants is set on OS line at COMMENT Block (Fig.1, Table 4).

4. Format of patent publication number and Description parts on FF

4-1) Format of patent publication number

DDBJ received three kind of patent publication for [1] Publication of patent applications, [2] Published Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) international publication for patent applications and [3] Japanese translations of PCT international publication for patent applications (Table 6).
Publication of patent applications and Japanese translations of PCT international publication for patent applications have same format of publication number with “JP” in head of its number. PCT international publication for patent applications have “WO”in head of publication number.

4-2) Format of patent publication number

Publication number is set on KEYWORDS line of LOCUS Block, JOURNAL line of REFERENCE Block and PN line of COMMENT Block (Fig.5).

Author comments

In this time, Patent column is final. When you would like to know FF structure and patent data property for JPO and KIPO data, please refer to my columns. If I have a chance, I will explain how to search the patent data by DDBJ tools and improvement points of JPO and KIPO FF.

5. New COMMENT format for Japan Patent Office (JPO) data

1. Introduction

DDBJ makes an improvement of COMMENT Block on Flat File (FF) for Japan Patent Office (JPO). In this column, I would like to introduce new format of COMMENT Block in detail.

DDBJ re-constructed FF of all JPO entries to reflect new COMMENT format. New format of Nucleotide sequence data has been released since DDBJ release 90 (Fig.1) and Amino acid sequence data has been distributed JPO cumulated files on Anonymous FTP since September 2012 (Fig.2).

2. New format of COMMENT Block

JPO data has almost basic information for patent application. Therefore, user can get its information without referring patent publication.
However, since patent information was set on different part of FF, user had to know the FF structure to get them in advance. In specially, applicants name is only set JOURNAL line on REFERENCE Block (Fig.3 & Fig.4).

Therefore, DDBJ made describing basic patent information on COMMENT Block as follows (Fig.4).

COMMENT Block was added new lines of PA (Applicant name), PT (Invention title) and PS (Sequence number) in all nucleotide and amino acid sequence data (Table.1).

Table.1 New lines of COMMENT Block

3. Sequence number

3-1:

There was mismatch problem of Sequence number between Sequence listings and JPO submission file. Old format FF was not described Sequence number of Sequence listings. Therefore, DDBJ added PS line on COMMENT Block to set its number.

3-2:

When applicants applied patent, they made Sequence listings according to the guideline: WIPO ST.25. It was put ordering number from 1 to nucleotide and amino acid sequences based on patent claims by applicants.
On the other hand, JPO changes sequence order and makes nucleotide sequence block and amino acid sequence block from Sequence listings when they make the submission files to DDBJ. After that, they set new Sequence number in order of nucleotide sequences, amino acid sequences (Table.2).

3-3:

Sequence number indicated by JPO is reflected with patent publication number on DEFINITION, KEYWORDS, JOURNAL line of REFERENCE and PN line of COMMENT Block.
Publication of patent applications and Japanese translations of Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) international publication for patent applications have same format of publication number with “JP”. PCT international publication for patent application has “WO” in head of publication number (Fig.1, Fig.2 and Table.3).

Table.3 Description part and Format of patent publication on FF

3-4:

Sequence number Sequence listings are set after prefix letter “N” on PS line. Therefore, you can retrieve appropriate data by ARSA (All-Retrieval of Sequence and Annotation) with publication number and “N” with Sequence number.

Author comments

DDBJ continues to make an improvement of Patent FF for user. As next step, we are planning FF put on direct link of the patent publication.