Preparing Sequence Listings on a daily basis helps keep those of us here at HCIP “in the know” with regards to what the patent office finds acceptable (and not acceptable) in Sequence Listing disclosures. That being said, the USPTO does its best to provide updated free-of-charge software to assist in the preparation of Sequence Listings. However, does this software prepare a listing that will be fully compliant with Sequence Listing requirements?
The answer to this question is “rarely.”
For the most part, the PatentIn software is sufficient. That said, however, a big limitation of this software is the inability to distinguish a non-ASCII character from an ASCII character which therefore allows non-ASCII characters to be incorporated into your listing. As we all know, Sequence Listings must be submitted in ASCII text, meaning the incorporation of non-ASCII characters WILL garner a rejection.
So how do these non-ASCII characters get into your listing? The most common way is by “copying and pasting” data directly from your patent application into the sequence files or the PatentIn program. When this happens, the character will not be rejected or produce an error notification until you try to run your listing through the Checker program.
Checker will inform you that the “Input File is neither Numeric or Alpha.” You WILL NOT receive any indication as to what the character in question is, or even where in your document this character may be. IF your listing is relatively short, say a handful of sequences, you can scroll through the document and hopefully find it by eye easily enough. However, and this is a BIG HOWEVER, if your listing is lengthy, as many listings are, you may find yourself scrolling through hundreds or thousands of sequences, or worse yet, thousands of pages.
As you can imagine, this can be a very tedious and daunting task. So how do you avoid the incorporation of these characters into your listing? Be EXTREMELY careful! Be sure to thoroughly review the data incorporated not only into the sequence files, but the cursory data as well, and when possible, hand-key anything that is a symbol or looks “suspicious.”
-The Harbor Consulting Team
For more information regarding Harbor Consulting, please visit www.seqidno.com.
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