What did Okazaki and Okazaki (1968) find when they compared the sizes of new DNA fragments that were in the process of being synthesized after stopping replication prematurely at different time intervals?
Okazaki fragments are short sequences of DNA nucleotides which are synthesized discontinuously and later linked together by the enzyme DNA ligase to create the lagging strand during DNA replication. Because the lagging strand needs to be replicated in the opposite direction of the way the replication fork is proceeding. And DNA polymerase can proceed only 5' to 3'. Thus, short fragments are produced as the replication fork expands. The length of Okazaki fragments in the lagging strand is about 100-200 nucleotides in eukaryotes and about 1000-2000 nucleotides in prokaryotes.
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