At the recent American Chemical Society National Meeting in Orlando, Fla., Chemical Abstracts Service showcased some of its new products.

STN Easy Patent Tab provides fast, easy-to-use patent lookup for Web users. The new Patent Tab feature is designed especially for those who are not patent search

experts but who can benefit from the vast amount of scientific information contained in patent records.

Users of STN Easy (http://stneasy.cas.org), an information search tool that is available on the Web, can now select the Patent Tab and search for patents by inventor, patent assignee, patent number, keywords, and more in a patent-centered research environment. Online help messages and examples are available to assist in choosing search terms specific to patents.

"Our new patent lookup tool makes it much easier for these nonspecialists to find valuable patent information, because it requires commonly used patent identifiers that they are likely to know," according to Suzan A. Brown, CAS marketing director. Once a user locates the patent of interest, the electronic full text of many patents can be accessed directly from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and the European Patent Office at no additional charge. "We believe that STN Easy Patent Tab is a good complement to our more extensive STN services designed for comprehensive prior art searching by patent information specialists," Brown says.

Also, for the first time, users of STN on the Web can apply the benefit of BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) to the wealth of sequence information in the CAS

Registry file and document records in STN databases. BLAST is a proprietary set of similarity search programs designed to explore all of the available sequence data-
bases regardless of whether the query is protein or DNA. BLAST programs have been designed for speed, with minimal sacrifice of sensitivity to distant sequence relationships. The scores assigned in a BLAST search have a well-defined statistical interpretation, making real matches easier to distinguish from random background hits.

After identifying a sequence similar to a queried sequence, the user can easily view associated published research and patents in a range of bioscience-related databases on the STN network and link to the full text of the documents via ChemPort.

"Information and patent professionals in the biotechnology industry have been looking forward to this new means of accessing publicly available documents related to nucleotide and protein sequences of interest," Brown says. "STN on the Web with CAS Registry BLAST is easily accessible and offers one-stop shopping. With this new addition to the digital information environment, users can for the first time follow an efficient route from the sequence to the relevant references, including patents."

By accessing STN on the Web through commonly available Web browsers, users can search more than 18 million publicly disclosed nucleotide or protein sequences in the CAS Registry database derived from patents, journal literature, and GenBank. Users can also identify a sequence similar to a queried sequence and retrieve the associated literature and patents.

Those who use BLAST in the CAS Registry benefit from several unique information components provided by CAS analysts, including proteins and nucleic acids with modifications on the side chains that render them chemically different from the "wild type"; separate entries for sequences that differ by even one amino acid or base; names assigned by CAS scientists to reflect origin, function, clone, and other information available in the patent or journal record for the sequence; and a unique class of sequences generated by proprietary CAS algorithms that read chemical structures and translate them into sequences.

BLAST is a registered trademark of the National Library of Medicine. For more information, contact the National Library of Medicine at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/, or see the article by Stephen F. Altschul et al., "Basic Local Alignment Search Tool" [J. Mol. Biol., 215, 403 (1990)].

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Copyright © 2002 American Chemical Society