Sequence Listing File Formats

BiSSAP supports the following file formats:

ST.25

The WIPO ST.25 standard, or ST.25, is the present WIPO-approved standard. It is the format currently used by applicants all over the world to submit sequence listings to patent offices.

This format is fully supported in BiSSAP, i.e. you can use it to create, import, edit and export files. There are certain limitations on the editing of elements that exist as unstructured data in ST.25 but that are structured and finely grained in XML.

XML

Not yet the official standard.

This format is fully supported in BiSSAP, i.e. you can use it to create, import, edit and export files. BiSSAP is built around this format, so its internal database fully reflects the XML sequence listing structure.

EMBL

This is the format used by the EBI to accept sequences from European Patent Office. This format is not accepted by patent offices.

BiSSAP imports and exports sequences in the EMBL format.

FASTA

In bioinformatics, FASTA is a text-based format for representing either nucleotide sequences or peptide sequences in which base pairs or amino acids are represented using single-letter codes. This format also allows sequence names and comments to precede sequences. FASTA is a simple format that makes it easy to manipulate and parse sequences using text-processing tools and scripting languages like Python, Ruby and Perl source: Wikipedia). This format is not accepted by patent offices.

Since FASTA is a popular among scientists, BiSSAP supports the importing and exporting of sequences in this format to provide more ways of building sequence listings.