Some Hidden Messages are More Surprising than Others
Discover how to find the reverse complement of DNA strands and understand its importance in genome replication. Learn to analyze frequent DNA patterns and their biological significance, especially in the Vibrio cholerae ori region, helping you connect computational results with biological processes.
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Recall that nucleotides A and T are complements of each other, as are C and G. Having one strand of DNA and a supply of “free floating” nucleotides as shown in figure below, one can imagine the synthesis of a complementary strand on a template strand. This model of replication was confirmed by Meselson and Stahl in 1958 (see DETOUR: The Most Beautiful Experiment in Biology). The figure below shows a template strand AGTCGCATAGT and its complementary strand ACTATGCGACT.
At this point, you may think that we have made a mistake since the complementary strand in the above figure reads out TCAGCGTATCA from left to right rather than ACTATGCGACT. We haven’t: each DNA strand has a direction, and the complementary strand runs in the opposite direction to the template strand, as shown by the arrows in above figure. Each strand is read in the 5 → 3 ...