Trailblazers by Scientific American Editors

Author:Scientific American Editors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
Published: 2018-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

For Blackburn, Szostak and Shampay, the observed fluctuations in telomere length were a sign that cells attempt to maintain telomeres at a roughly constant size. Yes, telomeres do shorten during cell division, but they are also lengthened by the attachment of newly synthesized telomeric subunits. The researchers suspected that the source of these additional repeats was some undiscovered enzyme capable of a trick that standard DNA polymerases could not perform.

When cells replicate their chromosomes, which consist of two strands of DNA twisted around each other, they begin by separating the double helix. The polymerases use each of these "parent " strands as a template for constructing a new partner. The special enzyme the workers envisioned would be able to build extensions to single strands of DNA from scratch, without benefit of an existing DNA template.

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