We evaluated the coding potential of all expressed intergenic regions, by conducting BLASTX based sequence searches against the non-redundant protein database at NCBI followed by manual analysis and interpretation. We identified 38 novel protein coding regions ( Table 2 ). The average length of the identified novel proteins was around 60 amino acids (ranged from 19 to 135 amino acids). The majority of the novel proteins (30) were conserved hypothetical proteins present in related species such as H. somni 129PT, M. haemolytica, and H. influenzae. Some of the novel proteins had predicted functions, such as DnaK suppressor protein, toxic membrane protein TnaC, and predicted toxic peptide ibsB3 ( Table 2 ). Figure 4 shows an example of a novel protein ''HSP7'' that is similar (74% similarity and 100% coverage) to a putative, phage-related DNA-binding protein of Neisseria polysaccharea.