Following Meselson and Stahl’s work, investigators confirmed that other organisms also use semiconservative replication. There are, however, several different ways that semiconservative replication can take place, differing principally in the nature of the template DNA—whether it is linear or circular—and in the number of replication forks. Replicon and Origin of …

Translation takes place on ribosomes; indeed, ribosomes can be thought of as moving protein-synthesizing machines. A ribosome attaches near the 5′ end of an mRNA strand and moves toward the 3′ end, translating the codons as it goes. Synthesis begins at the amino end of the protein, and the protein …

The process of transcription is very similar in prokaryotes and eukaryotes, but there are major differences in the relation between the transcript and the mRNA used for polypeptide synthesis in eukaryotes. In prokaryotes, the immediate product of transcription (the primary transcript) is mRNA; by contrast, the primary transcript (also called …