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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2013 Sep 1.
Published in final edited form as: Biochim Biophys Acta. 2011 Dec 20;1819(9-10):970–978. doi: 10.1016/j.bbagrm.2011.12.005

Figure 1. Schematic diagram of a mitochondrial DNA replication fork showing the critical proteins required for DNA replication.

Figure 1

The nascent DNA synthesized by pol γ (green) is shown as a solid red line, while the RNA primer (jagged red line) created by the mitochondrial RNA polymerase (orange) is being degraded by RNase H1 (yellow). The mitochondrial DNA helicase (purple) unwinds the downstream DNA forming a single-stranded loop which is coated with mtSSB (light blue). Topoisomerases (brown) work to relieve torsional tension in the DNA created by unwinding.