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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2014 Nov 14.
Published in final edited form as: EcoSal Plus. 2009 Aug;3(2):10.1128/ecosalplus.4.4.2. doi: 10.1128/ecosalplus.4.4.2

Fig. 1. Organization of the E. coli replisome.

Fig. 1

The parental duplex is unwound by the DnaB helicase (yellow) that encircles the lagging strand and travels ahead of the polymerase (blue) in the direction of the moving replication fork. Primase (purple) synthesizes short RNA primers to initiate Okazaki fragment synthesis on the lagging strand. The exposed single strand lagging strand template DNA is covered by SSB (pink). The two DNA polymerases are coupled through the clamp loader (green), which uses the energy of ATP hydrolysis to assemble the β processivity clamp (red) around primed sites on the DNA. For simplicity, the χ and ψ subunits of the clamp loader are omitted from the drawing.