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29 Apr 2018

I'm currently reading a little about DNA replication, and havecome accross the following statement;

Replication starts from a fixed point and is bi-directional ...In Eukaryotes, there are multiple replication forks, eachprogressing in a bi-directional fashion.

If there is a single, long strand of DNA in a Eukaryotic cell, Isee potential problems with this:

These forks involve opening up a section of double-stranded DNA,and each strand becoming a double strand in a newly synthesisedpiece of DNA. At some point, before any single fork has become twonew double-stranded molecules, another fork could 'collide' withthis, causing it to attempt to replicate the non-finishedsection.

Simply, how can one replication fork meet another without eitherexponentially increasing the number of strands beingreplicated?

Also, on a more general level, I would be quite interested toknow the actual benefit of this, when, typically, only a singlecopy of the double-stranded molecule needs making.

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Nestor Rutherford
Nestor RutherfordLv2
30 Apr 2018

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