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Cell cycle

A new check on issuing the licence

Nature volume 404, pages 560–561 (2000)Cite this article

It is crucial for the continuation of life that, as a cell replicates and divides, the genetic information encoded in its DNA (its genome) is duplicated and passed on accurately to the two new daughter cells. All of the genome must be replicated, with nothing left unreplicated and nothing replicated more than once. This apparently simple problem is made complicated by the way in which eukaryotic cells (those with a defined nucleus) go about copying their large genomes. ‘Replication forks’ progress along double-stranded DNA, copying both strands at a rate of 10 to 100 base pairs per second. At this rate, a single replication fork would take years to duplicate a typical genome. So, to speed things up, eukaryotes initiate replication forks at thousands of different places — called replication ‘origins’ — scattered throughout the genome.

This raises a new problem, however: replication forks must never be initiated on DNA that has already replicated during that cell-division cycle. Although general principles have been proposed to explain how cells prevent such re-replication, the precise mechanism is unknown. Writing in this issue, Nishitani and colleagues1 and Maiorano and co-workers2 now suggest the importance of a protein known as Cdt1 in this process.

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Figure 1: Steps in the licensing of a DNA-replication origin.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biochemistry, CRC Chromosome Replication Research Group, University of Dundee, Dundee, DD1 5EH, Dow Street, UK

    J. Julian Blow & Shusuke Tada

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  1. J. Julian Blow
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  2. Shusuke Tada
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Correspondence to J. Julian Blow.

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Blow, J., Tada, S. A new check on issuing the licence. Nature 404, 560–561 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35007187

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