Okazaki fragments
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Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- mobile genetic element
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- discoverer or inventor
- Reiji Okazaki
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Encyclopedic overview
Asymmetry in the synthesis of leading and lagging strands
Okazaki fragments are short sequences of DNA nucleotides (approximately 150 to 200 base pairs long in eukaryotes) which are synthesized discontinuously and later linked together by the enzyme DNA ligase to create the lagging strand during DNA replication. They were discovered in the 1960s by husband and wife Reiji and Tsuneko Okazaki, along with the help of some of their colleagues.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Okazaki fragments” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.