Talk:Open reading frame

Untitled
fixed the notion that there is difficulty in

ORF's in eukaryotic mRNA
reading possible ORF's in eukaryotic mRNA. It is normally monocistronic, so usually only a single ORF is contained therefore looking for the longest possible gene sequence between a start and stop codon should give you the correct amino acid sequence. Active contributor 17:27, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
 * This isn't rigorously true at all... the 'largest possible gene sequence between a start codon and a stop codon' would almost never give you the correct amino acid sequence. The 'largest possible gene sequence between a start codon and a stop codon' would include many downstream genes.24.240.37.200 (talk) 02:34, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

ORFs do not imply a protein
It is very important to note that not all ORFs ever encode a protein. There are ORFs within ORFs depending on the reading frame you look at. There are ORFs in non-coding regions of the genome. ORFs simply mean that you have a start codon and a stop codon in the same reading frame. They can be used as an initial filter to find potential genes, but many ORFs found this way are false positives. Any good gene finding algorithm looks at much more than just whether or not there is a stretch of DNA in the same reading frame with a start followed by a stop codon. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Johnstjohn (talk • contribs) 19:23, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

The meaning of the word "open"
Is there any source for the meaning of the word "open"? -Huggie (talk) 11:10, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

ORF without stop codon!?
The article claims that the "open" in ORF means that there is no stop codon. Surely this is incorrect! An ORF as far as I know extends from a start to a stop codon. So if in the example only one of the three frames has a stop codon then that one is the only ORF - right?

which is even referenced in the article also says: "An open reading frame starts with an atg (Met) in most species and ends with a stop codon (taa, tag or tga)."

--203.109.144.209 23:11, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * An ORF must contain both a start and stop codon, so none of the examples provided are necessarily open, but number 1 probably is, since there is likely a stop codon downstream that is not shown. Number three might be as well, but the beginning of an ORF and the reading frame is defined by a start codon, so it is meaningless just to talk about in-frame stop codons.24.240.37.200 (talk) 02:48, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

ORFs do not begin at start codons
Yes, the article is incorrect, on several points. The "open" means that there is no stop codon encoded in the frame.

The earliest citation I can find is that an open reading frame is "a long run of amino acid codons before the appearance of a terminator codon" R.F. Doolittle, Of URFs and ORFs, 1986; a start codon is not required for the definition of an ORF. The citation above also ignores the real possibility that a start codon other than ATG may be used. In addition, the exons of a eukaryotic gene, after the first exon, although they do not (necessarily) contain a functioning in-frame start codon, are also contained within ORFs.

An ORF is simply a contiguous section of nucleotide sequence that when, read in frame, contains no stop codons.

A portion of a reading frame that runs from a start to a stop codon is just a (putative) coding sequence (CDS, which page incidentally also provides an incorrect definition of coding sequence). Note that since many eukaryotic genes are intronic, you may not find a contiguous run from a start to a stop codon, and not all portions of a gene are necessarily used for coding (splice variation), nor must they all lie in the same frame.

143.234.97.119 (talk) 08:17, 20 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I've looked through a bunch of different sources and the only common thread I can find is that a) it appears to encode a protein and b) it is not interrupted by start or stop codons. As you say, alternate splicing might ignore the apparent stop codon, but the preceding sequence would still be considered an open reading frame.  I'm not sure whether the start/stop codons would be considered part of the ORF, but they definitely don't have to be there.  It's all very vague, one definition for example says that an ORF "begins with" and "ends with" an initiation codon and ends with a termination codon.  Then again, a gene technically does not have to include stop/start and so really the only difference between a CDS and an ORF is that a CDS encodes a known polypeptide and an ORF is just a sequence which is presumed to.  I agree that the wikipedia definition of CDS isn't much good.  It would be awesome if anyone could clarify all this. Master gopher (talk) 07:31, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Open reading frames are defined in terms of the stop codon. They are simply the reading frames that are "open"-- through which a ribosome could pass. A start codon cannot "interrupt" a reading frame because it would just be read as Met. The oldest use of the term that I can find is this one, though I would guess that the term originates with Crick or his colleagues.173.75.148.131 (talk) 04:05, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Really?
An ORF must contain a start codon, which defines the reading frame, and necessarily ends at a stop codon. Example 2 at the bottom of the introduction to the current revision of the article is not in frame.24.240.37.200 (talk) 02:34, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
 * If ORFs had no in frame stop codons, proteins would rarely be terminated. Excision of introns must be accounted for in locating an in-frame stop codon. It may not be in-frame prior to excision, but must be afterwards. All coding sequences are ORFs, and all ORFs are putative coding sequences.24.240.37.200 (talk) 02:51, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Six-frame Translation Diagram Lacks Explanation
There is no explanation on what is going on in this image. That would be really helpful.

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Open reading frame. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20091128111853/http://ugene.unipro.ru:80/plugin_orf_marker.html to http://ugene.unipro.ru/plugin_orf_marker.html

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Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 21:56, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

Citation versus text-book knowledge
Currently (October 2018) the text reads:

"Since DNA is interpreted in groups of three nucleotides (codons), a DNA strand has three distinct reading frames.[citation needed]"

I do not understand what "cituation" is necessary. It has been known for decades that a codon is interpreted at the Ribosome into one of the 20/22 aminoacids; or a stop codon. What citation is necessary? This information is already available (!) on wikipedia as-is in other articles. Here is the wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code#History

I suggest getting rid of the "citation needed" there. 2A02:8388:1604:CA80:F462:6A60:DEA:83A0 (talk) 09:15, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I actually found a decent and simple ref to add, so I've added that in for the sake of verifiability and to make it easier for readers to find more info. T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 12:06, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

Is this edit vandalism?
I was looking through the page history and saw this edit: diff. Is this vandalism? I don't know much about this stuff myself so I don't even know what's right or wrong here – but I do notice that the reference mentions DNA in the title. Can anyone help? Regards, DesertPipeline (talk) 15:18, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

It's been partially changed back now by the person who edited it originally, but "amino acids" hasn't been changed back to "nucleotides" – (diff). DesertPipeline (talk) 06:21, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
 * It was, yes. Though has been fixed now. T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 05:37, 2 March 2021 (UTC)