Replication

In molecular biology, DNA replication is the biological process of producing two identical replicas of DNA from one original DNA molecule. DNA replication occurs in all living organisms acting as the most essential part for biological inheritance. This is essential for cell division during growth and repair of damaged tissues, while it also ensures that each of the new cells receives its own copy of the DNA. The cell possesses the distinctive property of division, which makes replication of DNA essential.

Prokaryotic DNA Replication is the process by which a prokaryote duplicates its DNA into another copy that is passed on to daughter cells.Although it is often studied in the model organism E. coli, other bacteria show many similarities. Replication is bi-directional and originates at a single origin of replication (OriC). It consists of three steps: Initiation, elongation, and termination.

Eukaryotic DNA replication is a conserved mechanism that restricts DNA replication to once per cell cycle. Eukaryotic DNA replication of chromosomal DNA is central for the duplication of a cell and is necessary for the maintenance of the eukaryotic genome.

The mechanism of prokaryotes is conserved from prokaryotes to eukaryotes and is known as semiconservative DNA replication. The process of semiconservative replication for the site of DNA replication is a fork-like DNA structure, the replication fork, where the DNA helix is open, or unwound, exposing unpaired DNA nucleotides for recognition and base pairing for the incorporation of free nucleotides into double-stranded DNA.

Difference of Conservative v Semi-conservative:

The key difference between conservative and semiconservative replication is that the conservative replication produces two double helices in which one helix contains entirely old parental DNA and the other helix contains entirely new DNA while semiconservative replication produces double helices in which each strand of the two double helices formed would have one old and one new strand.

There are three postulated methods of DNA replication; namely, semi-conservative replication, conservative replication and dispersive replication. Among these three, conservative and dispersive replication is not found to be biologically significant.