A Protein Patent Query System Powered By Kleisli
Jing Chen (Kent Ridge Digital Laboratories)
Limsoon Wong (Kent Ridge Digital Laboratories)
Louxin Zhang (Kent Ridge Digital Laboratories)

Kleisli is an integration technology that is rather suitable in the bioinformatics arena. We developed a prototype system to more effectively query protein patents. This system uses Kleisli to tie together the following sources to answer queries on protein patents that are considerably more demanding than simple free-text search: (1) the protein section of the Entrez system at the National Center for Biotechnology Information; (2) the BLAST sequence homology service at the the National Center for Biotechnology Information; (3) the WU-BLAST2 sequence homology software from Washington University; (4) the Isite system at the US Patent and Trademark Office ; and (5) the structural classification of protein database SCOP at Cambridge MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

The system is aimed at these three questions: Is my protein sequence already patented? What are the prior arts? How to broaden my patent claims? The system provides the following information in response to these questions: It can find patented sequences that are similar to yours, it can try to determine the superfamily of your sequence and can find patented sequences that are similar to some sequences in the same superfamily, it can also find sequences that are similar to unpatented members in the same superfamily. An on-line demo of this system can be accessed at http://adenine.krdl.org.sg:8080/examples/patent.