by Roberto — If you were to plot the fre­quency of all known open read­ing frames (ORFs) as a func­tion of the num­ber codons they con­tain you'd see a broad dis­tri­b­u­tion show­ing an av­er­age of about three hun­dred codons and a long tail of very long ORFs. Just for fun, what are the very end points of the graph? What is the longest ORF known? And the short­est?