Significance
One common use of open reading frames is as one piece of evidence to assist in gene prediction. Long ORFs are often used, along with other evidence, to initially identify candidate protein coding regions in a DNA sequence. The presence of an ORF does not necessarily mean that the region is ever translated. For example in a randomly generated DNA sequence with an equal percentage of each nucleotide, a stop-codon would be expected once every 21 codons. A simple gene prediction algorithm for prokaryotes might look for a start codon followed by an open reading frame that is long enough to encode a typical protein, where the codon usage of that region matches the frequency characteristic for the given organism's coding regions. By itself even a long open reading frame is not conclusive evidence for the presence of a gene.
Read more about this topic: Open Reading Frame
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