Siew Naomi, Fischer Daniel
Department of Chemistry, Ben Gurion University, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel.
Comp Funct Genomics. 2003;4(4):432-41. doi: 10.1002/cfg.311.
ORFans are open reading frames (ORFs) with no detectable sequence similarity to any other sequence in the databases. Each newly sequenced genome contains a significant number of ORFans. Therefore, ORFans entail interesting evolutionary puzzles. However, little can be learned about them using bioinformatics tools, and their study seems to have been underemphasized. Here we present some of the questions that the existence of so many ORFans have raised and review some of the studies aimed at understanding ORFans, their functions and their origins. These works have demonstrated that ORFans are an untapped source of research, requiring further computational and experimental studies.
孤儿基因是指那些在数据库中与其他任何序列都没有可检测到的序列相似性的开放阅读框(ORF)。每个新测序的基因组都包含大量的孤儿基因。因此,孤儿基因带来了有趣的进化谜题。然而,使用生物信息学工具对它们的了解甚少,而且对它们的研究似乎一直未得到充分重视。在这里,我们提出了这么多孤儿基因的存在所引发的一些问题,并回顾了一些旨在了解孤儿基因、其功能及其起源的研究。这些研究表明,孤儿基因是一个尚未开发的研究来源,需要进一步的计算和实验研究。