The Office of the Controller General for Patents, Designs and Trademarks (CGPDTM) vide its public notice issued on June 17th, 2022[1], has notified that all Sequence Listings that are part of an international applications filed on and after July 01, 2022 under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) must comply with the WIPO Standard ST.26.
As per the notice, the applicants can use “WIPO Sequence”, a free global software tool that enables patent applicants to prepare amino acid and nucleotide sequence listings compliant with WIPO Standard ST.26. For using this tool, the applicants can visit https://www.wipo.int/standards/en/sequence/index.html. It has been further notified that only the sequence listings compliant with the WIPO Standard ST.26 will be accepted by the Indian Patent Office in respect of national applications as well from July 01, 2022. In case of any queries, the applicants can also write to sequencelisting-ipo@gov.in.
WIPO Standard ST.26
The WIPO Standard ST.26 is an international standard that defines the nucleotide and amino acid sequence disclosures in a patent application required to be included in a sequence listing i.e. the manner in which those disclosures are to be represented, and the Document Type Definition (DTD) for a sequence listing in XML (eXtensible Markup Language).
The purpose of this Standard is to[2]: (a) allow applicants to draw up a single sequence listing in a patent application acceptable for the purposes of both international and national or regional procedures; (b) enhance the accuracy and quality of presentations of sequences for easier dissemination, benefiting applicants, the public and examiners; (c) facilitate searching of the sequence data; and (d) allow sequence data to be exchanged in electronic form and introduced into computerized databases.
[1] https://ipindia.gov.in/newsdetail.htm?802
[2] https://www.wipo.int/standards/en/pdf/03-26-01.pdf
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