Results and Discussion

The number of Open Reading Frames (ORFs) resulting from our initial predictions totalled 99 000, which seemed too large to be realistic, and half of these were only 100 amino acids (100 aa) long. By filtering the dataset using a threshold of 300 aa for candidate genes we obtained a normal distribution of lengths, which seemed reasonable. [INSERT FIGURE plot of the distribution of lengths] In the blastx output, the longest complete sequence match was 40%. This is small as expected given the phylogenetic distance between m.polymorpha and a. thaliana [2][3]. Some of the predicted ORF sequences showed isolated, local matches rather than a series of matches along the sequence length. As we would have expected evolutionarily conserved motifs to be distributed along the length, this indicated that some of our predicted ORFs were unreliable. We decided to retain these sequences in producing our final table because…? We decided to discard these motifs? The Codon Usage table we obtained for m. polymorpha is not strikingly similar to that of a. thaliana, as expected from the 400 million years of evolutionary divergence between them [4]. However, there is a similarity in the slight preference for C over other bases at the end of codons and that for G-p-C sites, as can be seen in the codon table.