On the origin of microbial ORFans: quantifying the strength of the evidence for viral lateral transfer

BACKGROUND: The origin of microbial ORFans, ORFs having no detectable homology to other ORFs in the databases, is one of the unexplained puzzles of the post-genomic era. Several hypothesis on the origin of ORFans have been suggested in the last few years, most of which based on selected, relatively small, subsets of ORFans. One of the hypotheses for the origin of ORFans is that they have been acquired thru lateral transfer from viruses. Here we carry out a comprehensive, genome-wide study on the origins of ORFans to quantify the strength of current evidence supporting this hypothesis. RESULTS: We performed similarity searches by querying all current ORFans against the public virus protein database. Surprisingly, we found that only 2.8% of all microbial ORFans have detectable homologs in viruses, while the percentage of non-ORFans with detectable homologs in viruses is 7.9%, a significantly higher figure. This suggests that the current evidence for the origin of ORFans from lateral transfer from viruses is at best weak. However, an analysis of individual genomes revealed a number of organisms with much higher percentages, many of them belonging to the Firmicutes and Gamma-proteobacteria. We provide evidence suggesting that the current virus database may be biased towards those viruses attacking Firmicutes and Gamma-proteobacteria. CONCLUSION: We conclude that as more viral genomes are sequenced, more microbial ORFans will find homologs in viruses, but this trend may vary much for individual genomes. Thus, lateral transfer from viruses alone is unlikely to explain the origin of the majority of ORFans in the majority of prokaryotes and consequently, other, not necessarily exclusive, mechanisms are likely to better explain the origin of the increasing number of ORFans.