Nurturing Life Sciences
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#Unit 3. Fundamental Processes
Eukaryotic replicons are 40 to 100 kb in length and individual replicons are activated at characteristic times during S phase.
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Replicons in euchromatin initiate before replicons in heterochromatin
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The rate of replication is 2000 bp/min, which is much slower than the 50,000 bp/min of bacterial replication fork movement, presumably because the chromosome is assembled into chromatin, not naked DNA.
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From the speed of replication, it is evident that a mammalian genome could be replicated in 1 hour if all replicons functioned simultaneously. S phase actually lasts for 6 hours in a typical somatic cell, though, which implies that no more than 15% of the replicons are likely to be active at any given moment.
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