Annex C-bis TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS FOR THE PRESENTATION OF TABLES RELATED TO NUCLEOTIDE AND AMINO ACID SEQUENCE LISTINGS IN INTERNATIONAL PATENT APPLICATIONS UNDER THE PCT

Introduction

    • 1. These technical requirements have been elaborated so as to provide standardization of the presentation of tables related to nucleotide and amino acid sequence listings in international patent applications. These technical requirements are intended to allow the applicant to draw up such tables in a manner which is acceptable to all receiving Offices, International Searching Authorities, International Preliminary Examining Authorities and to the International Bureau for the purposes of the international phase and to all designated and elected Offices for the purposes of the national phase.

    Definition

    • 2. For the purposes of these technical requirements, "competent Authority" is the International Searching Authority that is to carry out the international search on the international application, or the International Preliminary Examining Authority that is to carry out the international preliminary examination on the international application, or the designated/elected Office before which the processing of the international application has started.

    Tables related to sequence listings

    • 3. Tables filed in electronic form under Section 801 (a) shall comply with one of the following character formats:

      • (i) UTF-8-encoded Unicode 3.0; or
      • (ii) XML format conforming to the "Application-Body" Document Type Definition referred to in Appendix I of Annex F;

      at the option of the competent Authority.

    • 4. The spatial relationships (e.g., columns and rows) of the table elements shall be maintained.
    • 5. At the option of the competent Authority, file compression is acceptable, so long as the compressed file is in a self-extracting format that will decompress on a Personal Computer Operating system that is acceptable to the competent Authority and to the International Bureau.
    • 6. Each table shall be contained within a separate electronic file on any electronic medium that is acceptable to the competent Authority. The file recorded on the electronic medium that is acceptable to the competent Authority shall be encoded using IBM Code Page 437, IBM Code Page 932 or a compatible code page. A compatible code page, as would be required for, for example, Japanese, Chinese, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek or Hebrew characters, is one that assigns the Roman alphabet and numerals to the same hexadecimal positions as do the specified code pages.
    • 7. Tables filed in electronic form may be created by any means, as long as the table on an electronic medium that is acceptable to the competent Authority is readable under a Personal Computer Operating system that is acceptable to the competent Authority and to the International Bureau.
    • 8. If the electronic medium that is acceptable to the competent Authority is submitted after the date of filing of an application, the labels shall also include the filing date of the application and the application number.

    [Annex D follows]