Structure and Replication of Vaccinia Virus Telomeres
- B.M. Baroudy,
- S. Venkatesan, and
- B. Moss
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
In both prokaryotic and eukaryotic systems, DNA synthesis proceeds by the addition of deoxyribonucleotides to RNA primers (Sugino et al. 1972; Tseng and Goulian 1977). The short RNA segments are then excised, and the resulting gaps are filled in with deoxyribonucleotides. Such a mechanism can lead to the complete replication of circular DNA but does not provide a way of filling in the gap remaining at the 5′ end of a linear molecule. However, the latter step can be accomplished by the formation of circular or concatemeric replication intermediates (Watson 1972). A possible third mechanism for the replication of the ends of linear DNA molecules was suggested by Cavalier-Smith (1974), who considered that if the ends of eukaryotic DNA molecules were palindromic, they could fold back on themselves to form base-paired loops. As a simplification of this model, Bateman (1975) suggested that the telomeres of eukaryotic chromosomes might be covalently...
