Table 3.

Number of patent documents, which contain formatted sequence listings, as extracted from United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) full text and bulk listings data sets and compared to those available at GenBank-Patent division (GB-PAT) from 1982–2013

Publication date	USPTO documents	Gb-PAT documents	Corresponding sequences missing from GB-PAT
Mar 1982–Jun 1990	Selected grants were sent to NCBI	1,005 (23,850 sequences)	Not known
Jun 1990–Nov 1992	2	0	4
Nov 1992–Dec 2001	18,391 grants	16,220 grants	127,588
Jan 2001–April 2013	97,567 applications	0	78,556,258

The last column shows the number of patent sequences that were missing in GB-PAT division and thus not available in machine-searchable form to the public. Individually, an electronic copy of the sequence listing can be requested from USPTO based on a fee set under 37 CFR 1.19(b)(3) (http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2435.html).