Sense antisense DNA strand?

Recent evidence indicates that alphaherpesviruses express latency associated transcripts (LATs) from the antisense strand of immediate-early (IE) genes of the viral genome. It has been suggested that LATs containing extended open reading frames (ORFs), might be translated into (a) protein product(s). We found that a salient feature of some herpesvirus DNAs is a high GC preference at the third codon positions. The consequence of this feature is that the probability of a stop-codon appearing at two of the six reading frames of the DNA strand is very low. Therefore, the presence of an extended ORF does not necessarily mean that it is relevant to real translation.