This simulator visualizes the replication fork in action, showing helicase unwinding the helix, single-strand binding proteins stabilizing the exposed strands, and the contrasting continuous versus discontinuous synthesis of the leading and lagging strands.
Press play to watch the fork advance, and use the controls to adjust the fork speed or step through the formation and joining of individual Okazaki fragments on the lagging strand.
Adjust fork speed and toggle labels for helicase, primase, single-strand binding proteins, and Okazaki fragments while stepping through the replication animation.
Human cells rely on thousands of replication origins firing across the genome simultaneously, since a single fork moving at only about 50 nucleotides per second would otherwise take weeks to copy all three billion base pairs alone.
This simulator visualizes the replication fork in action, showing helicase unwinding the helix, single-strand binding proteins stabilizing the exposed strands, and the contrasting continuous versus discontinuous synthesis of the leading and lagging strands.
This simulator visualizes the replication fork in action, showing helicase unwinding the helix, single-strand binding proteins stabilizing the exposed strands, and the contrasting continuous versus discontinuous synthesis of the leading and lagging strands.
Press play to watch the fork advance, and use the controls to adjust the fork speed or step through the formation and joining of individual Okazaki fragments on the lagging strand.
Human cells rely on thousands of replication origins firing across the genome simultaneously, since a single fork moving at only about 50 nucleotides per second would otherwise take weeks to copy all three billion base pairs alone.