The primase and polymerase move in the opposite direction of the fork, so the enzymes must repeatedly stop and start again while the DNA helicase breaks the strands apart. This causes periodic breaks in the process of creating the lagging strand. The lagging strand, however, cannot be created in a continuous fashion because its template strand has 5вЂ™ to 3вЂ™ directionality, which means the polymerase must work backwards from the replication fork. One strand, the leading strand, undergoes a continuous replication process since its template strand has 3вЂ™ to 5вЂ™ directionality, allowing the polymerase assembling the leading strand to follow the replication fork without interruption. Because these enzymes can only work in the 5вЂ™ to 3вЂ™ direction, the two unwound template strands are replicated in different ways. Following this fork, DNA primase and DNA polymerase begin to act in order to create a new complementary strand. During DNA replication, the double helix is unwound and the complementary strands are separated by the enzyme DNA helicase, creating what is known as the DNA replication fork. They were discovered in the 1960s by the Japanese molecular biologists Reiji and Tsuneko Okazaki, along with the help of some of their colleagues.

Topic: Okazaki Fragment Okazaki fragments are short sequences of DNA nucleotides (approximately 150 to 200 base pairs long in eukaryotes) which are synthesized discontinuously and later linked together by the enzyme DNA ligase to create the lagging strand during DNA replication.