Cabo San Lucas, Mexico â Residents and tourists hunkered down in shelters and hotel conference rooms overnight as a powerful and sprawling Hurricane Odile made landfall on the southern Baja California peninsula.
DNA replication is one of the most basic processes that occurs within a cell. Each time a cell divides, the two resulting daughter cells must contain exactly the same genetic information, or DNA, as the parent cell. To accomplish this, each strand of existing DNA acts as a template for replication.
In the prokaryotic bacterium E. coli, replication can occur at a rate of 1,000 nucleotides per second. In comparison, eukaryotic human DNA replicates at a rate of 50 nucleotides per second. In both cases, replication occurs so quickly because multiple polymerases can synthesize two new strands at the same time by using each unwound strand from the original DNA double helix as a template. One of these original strands is called the leading strand, whereas the other is called the lagging strand.