Meeting Abstract

74.2  Sunday, Jan. 6  Statistical properties of open reading frame distributions: A broad scale comparison of genome architecture MCCOY, M. W.*; GILLOOLY, J. F.; University of Florida; University of Florida mmccoy@zoo.ufl.edu

A better understanding of the size and abundance of open reading frames (ORFS) in whole genomes may shed light on the factors that control genome complexity. Here we examine the statistical distributions of open reading frames (i.e. distribution of start and stop codons) in the fully sequenced genomes of DNA viruses, prokaryotes, and unicellular and multi-cellular eukaryotes. Results show that the size-frequency distributions for ORFS are strikingly similar across all genomes, and highly correlated with GC content. In addition, these results indicate that a large fraction of these distributions can be described by random processes.