The DNA sequence of the fd genome has 6408 nucleotide comprising 9 genes, but the genome has 11 open reading frames producing 11 proteins, since two genes, gene 2 and gene 1, have internal in-frame translation starts, generating two additional proteins, p10 and p11. The genome also contains a short non-coding intergenic sequence. M13 and f1 sequences are slightly different from fd. They both have only 6407 nucleotides; f1 differs from fd in 180 positions (only 10 of these changes are reflected in amino-acid changes in gene products) and M13 has only 59 nucleotide differences from f1. For many purposes the phages in the Ff group can be considered as interchangeable.
Five gene products are part of the virion: the major coat protein (p8) and the minor proteins capping the two ends, p3 and p6 at one end, and p7 and p9 at the other end. Three gene products (p2, p5, and p10) are cytoplasmic proteins needed for DNA synthesis and the rest are membrane proteins involved in assembly of the virion.
The gene encoding p1 has been used as a conserved marker gene, along with three other features specific for inovirus genomes, in an automatic machine-learning approach to identify over 10000 inovirus-like sequences from microbial genomes.