Tools & Information Resources
- Sybaris Team
- Apr 23, 2021
- 2 min read
A) Biotechnology & Bioinformatics Tools
i) Sequence Format Converter
Purpose: Convert an input sequence or alignment to a user-specified format.
ii) Online sequence conversion tool
Converting sequence from one to another, e.g from EMBL to CLUSTAL
iii) Convert GENBANK to FASTA
iv) Homology Searches
BLAST & FASTA tools
v) Transcription and Translation Tool
Converts sequences from DNA to RNA and from this to protein
vi) Conversion of Units of Measurement
Molar Quantity to Molar Concentration
DNA to Protein
Others
B) Patent Databases
Students and researchers may not be willing to or have access to paid databases, so this
blogpost provides some guidance to some commonly available patent sources of
information:
i) USPTO: United States Patents and Trademarks Office
The link below gives you quick access to commonly used portals within USPTO, like
Issued/Granted Patent Search, Published Applications Search, Assignment Database,
PAIR search etc.
Quick Links:
Patent Number Search
Fielded Search
Only Patents filed within US jurisdiction can be searched. This also includes Utility,
Design, Plant patents, Re-issue patents etc. For self-learning on basics of patent search
strategy, the document guide available on USPTO site can be handy. The site also
provides link to national patent websites of other prominent countries
ii) ESPACENET : European Patent Office
The link below gives you access to commonly used information resources via Espacenet
The search on EPO site can be carried using following links:
While the basics of patent searching remains in principal the same, the site navigation
page, look/design and feel, additional features/enhancements vary from one to another.
Unlike USPTO, Espacenet site allows one to search for patents from different
jurisdictions including the US.
One can search for simple numbers, or fielded combination using Advanced
Search option. Besides this, EPO offers other services for downloading data via the
following page:
You can also access other country patent websites using the following link:
ii) WIPO : World Intellectual Property Organization
Let us look at the coverage of this patent database
Searching capability wise, the site offers Simple, Advanced and Field combination
capability to the users.
Besides this, the site offers a unique compound searching capability and this can be
used by creating an account with WIPO website. Once done, you can do Chemical
Compound search using the following link:
You can conduct structure searching in all the databases or in a select few,
depending on your needs and search parameters.
WIPO has recently enabled Non-patent searching functionality on their site, and
over 54000 documents are searchable on PatentScope. This feature can be enabled
using the Advanced function feature.
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