Question

What is the cause of discontinuous synthesis of DNA on one of the parental strands of DNA? What happens to these short stretches of the DNA synthesised?

Answer 1

• DNA polymerase can polymerise the nucleotides only in 5’ → 3’ direction.
• Hence, on the template strand of DNA with 5’ → 3’ polarity, there is discontinuous synthesis at the replication fork.
• These short stretches of DNA are joined together by DNA-ligase into a new strand of DNA.