by Merry Youle — Given the stream­lined genomes and the fru­gal na­ture of the Bac­te­ria and Ar­chaea, one might ex­pect their pro­teins to be short and to the point. How­ever, a sur­vey of the 580 prokary­otic se­quenced genomes avail­able in 2008 found many genes ap­par­ently en­cod­ing large pro­teins. Specif­i­cally, 0.2% of the ORFs (3732 genes) were longer…