Exciting footage has just emerged from University of California, Davis, where researchers has filmed the process of DNA replication for the first time in human history. We’ve known about the processes for a while, but this is the first time we get to see it happening on film. The best part is that it is available at YouTube, so everyone gets to take a look:
The 11 second long video can be pretty cryptic if you don’t know what you are looking at, but what we are seeing here are the strands that are undergoing DNA polymerase. The dots that grow longer are DNA strands, which are the DNA in the part of the DNA replication after they have separated from a single double-strand helix into two independent strands.
The video also shows some big news in regards to how we expect DNA replication to work. One the helix has divided into two strands, we get the leading strand and the lagging strand. We have always thought that these were somehow connected during replication, where the lagging strand would do as the leading strand does (in order to not undergo any mutations during the process), but the video clearly shows that the leading and the lagging strand undergoes replication entirely on their own, in their own pace. This means that there must be another mechanism that controls this problem.
It is still too early to know what implications this will have for our understanding of DNA replication, but it will most likely lead to the rewriting of lots of biology textbooks in the future.
Thanks for reading!
If you’re interested to read more, check out the post at the UC David website about the discovery. They go into a lot more detail about the DNA replication, so make sure to check it out if you are not familiar with it.