a minimal length, e.g. 100 codons or 150 codons. By itself even a long open reading frame is not conclusive evidence for the presence of a gene. Short ORFs (sORFs) Some short ORFs (sORFs), also named Small open reading frames that lack the classical hallmarks of protein-coding genes (both from ncRNAs and mRNAs) can produce functional peptides. 5’-UTR of about 50% of mammal mRNAs are known to contain one or several sORFs, also called upstream ORFs or uORFs. However, less than 10% of the vertebrate mRNAs surveyed in an older study contained AUG codons in front of the major ORF. Interestingly, uORFs were found in two thirds of proto-oncogenes and related proteins. 64–75% of experimentally found translation initiation sites of sORFs are conserved in the genomes of human and mouse and may indicate that these elements have function. However, sORFs can often be found only in the minor forms of mRNAs and avoid selection; the high conservation of initiation sites may be connected with their location inside promoters of the relevant genes. This is characteristic of SLAMF1 gene, for example. Six-frame translation Since DNA is interpreted in groups of three nucleotides (codons), a DNA strand has three distinct reading frames. The double helix of a DNA molecule has two anti-parallel strands; with the two strands having three reading frames each, there are six possible frame translations. Software Finder The ORF Finder (Open Reading Frame Finder) is a graphical analysis tool which finds all open reading frames of a selectable minimum size in a user's sequence or in a sequence already in the database. This tool identifies all open reading frames using the standard or alternative genetic codes. The deduced amino acid sequence can be saved in various formats and searched against the sequence database using the basic local alignment search tool (BLAST) server. The ORF Finder should be helpful in preparing complete and accurate sequence submissions. It is also packaged with the Sequin sequence submission software (sequence analyser). Investigator ORF Investigator is a program which not only gives information about the coding and non coding sequences but also can perform pairwise global alignment of different gene/DNA regions sequences. The tool efficiently finds the ORFs for corresponding amino acid sequences and converts them into their single letter amino acid code, and provides their locations in the sequence. The pairwise global alignment between the sequences makes it convenient to detect the different