The C. elegans ORFeome is an evolving resource. The cloning of a (nearly) complete ORFeome will be an iterative process. At each step, predicted ORFs that are successfully cloned in-frame (+) are added to the ORFeome resource. New attempts to clone ORFs that we cloned out-of-frame (o.o.f.) or that we did not clone (-) in earlier cloning steps are based on new or updated predictions (red box). The first two rounds of cloning, ORFeome Version 1 and Version 3, were based on two “snapshots” of the C. elegans genome annotation, WS9 and WS100, respectively. Further cloning steps will be based on different approaches to repredict ORFs, such as comparative genomics. Our current ORFeome resource, v3.1, contains ∼12,500 cloned ORFs. At this stage, our ORFeome resource contains pools of clones for each predicted gene. We are in the process of generating a new resource, ORFeome v2 (Reboul et al. 2003), in which we isolate individual wild-type clones for all detected splice variants of ORFs cloned in v1.1a.
