In Vivo Mechanism of DNA Chain Growth
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
Replication of DNA by the base-pairing mechanism proposed by Watson and Crick (1953a,b) has been supported by both in vivo (Meselson and Stahl, 1958) and in vitro experiments (Bessman et al., 1958; Lehman et al., 1958; Josse et al., 1961).
The Meselson and Stahl experiment and subsequent in vivo studies (Maaløe and Hanawalt, 1961; Hanawalt et al., 1961; Cairns, 1963a,b; Nagata, 1963; Yoshikawa and Sueoka, 1963a,b; Bonhoeffer and Gierer, 1963; Lark et al., 1963) indicated that replication of the bacterial chromosome proceeds sequentially. This led to the inference that both daughter strands of chromosomal DNA grow continuously, the direction of synthesis being 5′ to 3′ on one strand and 3′ to 5′ on the other (Fig. 1A). This mechanism of continuous chain growth, however, conflicts with the fact that the in vitro DNA synthesis by DNA polymerase proceeds in the 5′ to 3′ direction (Kornberg, 1960; Mitra and Romberg, 1966)...
