Within the family Reoviridae, genome segments encoding more than one protein, from distinct, ORFs have been previously reported for the aquareoviruses, fijiviruses, orthoreoviruses, rotaviruses, phytoreoviruses and oryzaviruses [1] . Genome segments of the orthoreoviruses, phytoreoviruses, oryzaviruses and rotaviruses can be bi-or tri-cistronic with overlapping ORFs. Those in the phytoreoviruses (Seg-9 and Seg-12), orthoreoviruses (segment S1) and rotaviruses (Seg-11) were also found to be expressed in infected cell cultures [40, 41, 42, 43, 44] . Translation of overlapping ORFs from reovirus genome segments has usually been shown to be dependent on leaky scanning [41, 43, 44] although scanning-independent ribosome shunting has also been described [42, 45] .