Antisense overlapping open reading frames in genes from bacteria to humans

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Abstract
Long Open Reading Frames (ORFs) in antisense DNA strands have been reported in the literature as being rare events. However, an extensive analysis of the GenBank database revealed that a substantial number of genes from several species contain an in-phase ORF in the antisense strand, that overlaps entirely the coding sequence of the sense strand, or even extends beyond. The findings described in this paper show that this is a frequent, non-random phenomenon, which is primarily dependent on codon usage, and to a lesser extent on gene size and GC content. Examination of the sequence database for several prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms, demonstrates that coding sequences with in-phase, 100% overlapping antisense ORFs are present in every genome studied so far.