In,

molecular genetics Molecular genetics is a sub-field of biology that addresses how differences in the structures or expression of DNA molecules manifests as variation among organisms. Molecular genetics often applies an "investigative approach" to determine the ...

, an ORFeome refers to the complete set of

open reading frames In molecular biology, open reading frames (ORFs) are defined as spans of DNA sequence between the start and stop codons. Usually, this is considered within a studied region of a prokaryotic DNA sequence, where only one of the six possible readin ...

(ORFs) in a

genome In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding g ...

. The term may also be used to describe a set of

cloned Cloning is the process of producing individual organisms with identical or virtually identical DNA, either by natural or artificial means. In nature, some organisms produce clones through asexual reproduction. In the field of biotechnology, ...

ORFs. ORFs correspond to the protein coding sequences (CDS) of

gene In biology, the word gene (from , ; "... Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a b ...

s. ORFs can be found in genome sequences by computer programs such as

GENSCAN In bioinformatics, GENSCAN is a program to identify complete gene structures in genomic DNA. It is a G HMM-based program that can be used to predict the location of genes and their exon-intron boundaries in genomic sequences from a variety of org ...

and then amplified by PCR. While this is relatively trivial in

bacteria Bacteria (; singular: bacterium) are ubiquitous, mostly free-living organisms often consisting of one Cell (biology), biological cell. They constitute a large domain (biology), domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometr ...

the problem is non-trivial in

eukaryotic Eukaryotes () are organisms whose Cell (biology), cells have a cell nucleus, nucleus. All animals, plants, fungi, and many unicellular organisms, are Eukaryotes. They belong to the group of organisms Eukaryota or Eukarya, which is one of the ...

s because of the presence of introns and exons as well as splice variants.

Use in research

The usage of complete ORFeomes reflects a new trend in biology that can be succinctly summarized as

omics The branches of science known informally as omics are various disciplines in biology whose names end in the suffix '' -omics'', such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, metagenomics, phenomics and transcriptomics. Omics aims at the collect ...

. ORFeomes are used for the study of protein-protein interactions,

protein microarray A protein microarray (or protein chip) is a high-throughput method used to track the interactions and activities of proteins, and to determine their function, and determining function on a large scale. Its main advantage lies in the fact that larg ...

s, the study of antigens, and other fields of study.

Cloned ORFeomes

Complete ORF sets have been cloned for a number of organisms including ''

Brucella melitensis ''Brucella melitensis'' is a Gram-negative coccobacillus bacterium from the Brucellaceae family. The bacterium causes ovine brucellosis, along with '' Brucella ovis''. It affects primarily sheep and goats, but cases have also been observed in c ...

'', ''

Chlamydia pneumoniae ''Chlamydia pneumoniae'' is a species of ''Chlamydia'', an obligate intracellular bacterium that infects humans and is a major cause of pneumonia. It was known as the Taiwan acute respiratory agent (TWAR) from the names of the two original isola ...

'', ''

Escherichia coli ''Escherichia coli'' (),Wells, J. C. (2000) Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Harlow ngland Pearson Education Ltd. also known as ''E. coli'' (), is a Gram-negative, facultative anaerobic, rod-shaped, coliform bacterium of the genus '' Esc ...

'', '' Neisseria gonorrhoeae'', ''

Pseudomonas aeruginosa ''Pseudomonas aeruginosa'' is a common encapsulated, gram-negative, aerobic–facultatively anaerobic, rod-shaped bacterium that can cause disease in plants and animals, including humans. A species of considerable medical importance, ''P. aerug ...

'', ''Schizosaccharomyces pombe'', '' Staphylococcus aureus'' and human herpesviruses A partial human ORFeome has also been produced.http://horfdb.dfci.harvard.edu/ Human ORFeome 2011 Release

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Orfeome Molecular genetics Genomics