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Comment
. 2015 Sep 14;16(1):189.
doi: 10.1186/s13059-015-0765-3.

Finding smORFs: getting closer

Juan Pablo Couso  1
Affiliations
Comment

Finding smORFs: getting closer

Juan Pablo Couso. Genome Biol. .

Abstract

Millions of small open reading frames exist in eukaryotes. We do not know how many, or which are translated, but bioinformatics is getting us closer to the answer. See related Research article: http://www.genomebiology.com/2015/16/1/179.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The number of small open reading frames (smORFs) in eukaryotic genomes (shown in log scale) greatly exceeds that of annotated protein-coding genes, and reaches 265,000 in yeast [4], 556,000 in the fruit fly Drosophila [2], and 40,700,000 in mouse [3]. Note that the current number of corroborated functional smORFs is but a small fraction of these (see text and [1] for details). The number of annotated protein-coding genes was obtained from the Saccharomyces Genome Database (yeast; http://www.yeastgenome.org/), FlyBase (fruit fly; http://flybase.org/), and Ensembl (mouse; http://www.ensembl.org/index.html) (accessed 12 August 2015)
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References

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    1. Andrews SJ, Rothnagel JA. Emerging evidence for functional peptides encoded by short open reading frames. Nat Rev Genet. 2014;15:193–204. doi: 10.1038/nrg3520. - DOI - PubMed

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