Identifying the ORF

In this section we'll show you some simple EMBOSS applications for translating your cDNA sequence into protein. You should be aware that gene structure prediction is a tough problem, and recognising exon/intron boundaries in genomic sequence is not easy; for now, rather than deal with that aspect of prediction, we'll use the cDNA sequence in our practical. First, we need to identify our open reading frame. We can get a rapid visual overview of the distribution of ORFs in the six frames of our sequence using the EMBOSS program plotorf.