February 12, 2011 - Track & Field Menâs and Womenâs Track and Field Top Yale, Fall to Princeton at HYP Meet In its final meet before the Heptagonal Championships, the Harvard track and field team turned in a pair of second-place finishes at the annual HYP...
An Okazaki fragment is a relatively short fragment of DNA (with an RNA primer at the 5' terminus) created on the lagging strand during DNA replication. It was originally discovered in 1968 by Reiji Okazaki, Tsuneko Okazaki, and their colleagues while studying replication of bacteriophage DNA in Escherichia coli.
It is also oriented in the opposite direction when compared to the leading strand, with the 5' near the replication fork instead of the 3' end as is the case with the leading strand. When the enzyme helicase unwinds DNA, two single stranded regions of DNA (the replication fork) form.his poses no problems for the leading strand, which can continuously synthesize DNA in a processive manner, but creates a problem for the lagging strand, which cannot be synthesized in the 3' â 5' direction. Thus, the lagging strand is synthesized in short segments known as Okazaki fragments.