Question

At the end of replication, about 100 nucleotides remain unreplicated on the lagging daughter strand. what mechanism (and what enzyme) in eukaryotes solves the problem of shortened dna ends?

Answer 1

There were three models of replication possible from such a scheme: conservative, semi-conservative, and dispersive. In conservative replication, the two original DNA strands,  known as the parental strands, would re-basepair with each other after being used as templates to synthesize new strands; and the two newly-synthesized strands, known as the daughter strands, would also basepair with each other; one of the two DNA molecules after replication would be “all-old” and the other would be “all-new”. In semi-conservative replication, each of the two parental DNA strands would act as a template for new DNA strands to be synthesized, but after replication, each parental DNA strand would basepair with the complementary newly-synthesized strand just synthesized, and both double-stranded DNAs would include one parental or “old” strand and one daughter or “new” strand. In dispersive replication, after replication both copies of the new DNAs would somehow have alternating segments of parental DNA and newly-synthesized DNA on each of their two strands.