Mechanism of DNA replication in Drosophila chromosomes: structure of replication forks and evidence for bidirectionality.

The replicating chromosomal DNA in Drosophila melanogaster cleavage nuclei has been visualized in the electron microscope as a serial array of closely spaced replicated regions created by pairs of diverging replication forks. The fine structure of the forks is very similar to that observed for the replication forks of bidirectionally replicating bacteriophage DNAs. However, the mean length of the single-stranded gaps in Drosophila forks is less than 200 nucleotide residues, much shorter than the gaps in phage forks. This difference in gap length corresponds to the observed difference in the size of Okazaki fragments from Drosophila and phage.