An expanded reference catalog of translated open reading frames for biomedical research

Chothani, Ruiz-Orera, Tierney, Clauwaert, Menschaert et al. (2026) present a major update to the TransCODE Consortium’s community-driven catalog of non-canonical open reading frames (ncORFs) in the human genome, published in Nucleic Acids Research. Building on the first catalog released in 2022, the expanded version incorporates additional Ribo-seq datasets and removes previous constraints on ORF length and start codon, yielding a comprehensive set of 28,359 ncORFs, nearly four times the size of the original. The catalog also introduces a standardised evidence framework for assessing the translation status of individual ncORFs, a key gap in the first release. Distributed through Ensembl-GENCODE, it provides the research community with a validated reference resource for ncORF-based biomedical discovery.