Cabo San Lucas, Mexico â Residents and tourists hunkered down in shelters and hotel conference rooms overnight as a powerful and sprawling Hurricane Odile made landfall on the southern Baja California peninsula.
DNA replication is one of the most basic processes that occurs within a cell. Each time a cell divides, the two resulting daughter cells must contain exactly the same genetic information, or DNA, as the parent cell. To accomplish this, each strand of existing DNA acts as a template for replication.
This unzipping takes place in both directions from the replication origins, creating a replication bubble. The replication is therefore said to be bi-directional. Once the two strands are separated a small piece of RNA, called an RNA primer, is attached to the DNA by an enzyme called DNA primase. These primers are the beginnings of all new DNA chains since the enzyme responsible for the copying of the DNA, DNA polymerase, can not start from scratch.