DNA Replication in Bacteria

Abstract

Publisher Summary The chapter describes the many physical, biochemical, and genetic requirements for cellular DNA replication. The chapter also discusses the DNA replication in bacteria, emphasizing work done with Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis, the two most widely used organisms. In general, the complexity of DNA replication is expected to increase with phylogenetic order, with bacteriophage DNA replication being less complex than mammalian chromosome synthesis. Consequently, more is known about phage DNA replication than bacterial or eukaryotic chromosome synthesis. Difficulties have arisen because of two characteristics of replication. First, because replication has a stringent but structurally delicate dependency on the cell membrane, and on many replication proteins, an adequate reconstruction of the complete replication complex has never been achieved. In addition, many replication proteins are still unidentified. A second characteristic is that the process of chromosome replication is interrelated with other poorly understood processes, such as cell division and recombination. Knowledge of some of these complex relationships may be important in understanding the DNA replication process itself.