Topic summary
Lagging strand
Extracted from the Wikipedia article DNA replication.
Lagging strand
The lagging strand is the strand of new DNA whose direction of synthesis is opposite to the direction of the growing replication fork, although the chemical reaction is exactly the same. Because of its orientation, replication of the lagging strand is more complicated as compared to that of the leading strand. As a consequence, the DNA polymerase on this strand is seen to "lag behind" the other strand.