Abstract
OKAZAKAI et al. showed that bacteria labelled with short pulses of radioactive thymidine incorporate radioactivity into small DNA fragments, the so-called Okazaki pieces1. These fragments have been observed in various bacterial, bacteriophage and eukaryotic systems2,3. Pulse-chase experiments demonstrated that the Okazaki pieces are precursors of longer DNA chains, indistinguishable in length from the bulk of the DNA. Thus, the idea has arisen that DNA synthesis proceeds discontinuously on at least one of the two growing DNA chains of a given replication fork; that is, individual short DNA fragments are synthesised by a 5′ → 3′ DNA polymerase and then joined to the growing chain by ligase2.
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