Biochemistry 4th Edition by Christopher Mathews,Kensal van Holde, Dean Appling, Spencer Anthony Cahill

Exercise 2

After Okazaki's proposal of discontinuous DNA chain growth, there was much controversy about whether both DNA strands are synthesized discontinuously, or only the lagging strand. Clearly, there is no need for the leading strand to be synthesized in fragments, but many workers found that pulse-labeled DNA fragments hybridized to both parental DNA strands. This finding indicated that both parental strands served as the template for synthesis of short DNA fragments. Propose an alternative mechanism by which leading strand replication could generate short fragments, and propose an experimental test of your suggestion. (Hint: Look at Chapter 26.)