ORFeome

In molecular genetics, an ORFeome refers to the complete set of open reading frames (ORFs) in a genome.

ORFs can be found in genome sequences by computer programs such as GENSCAN and then amplified by PCR.

While this is relatively trivial in bacteria the problem is non-trivial in eukaryotic genomes because of the presence of introns and exons as well as splice variants.

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

Complete ORF sets have been cloned for a number of organisms including Brucella melitensis,[5] Chlamydia pneumoniae,[6] Escherichia coli,[7] Neisseria gonorrhoeae,[8] Pseudomonas aeruginosa,[9] Schizosaccharomyces pombe, Staphylococcus aureus[10] and human herpesviruses[11] A partial human ORFeome has also been produced.