Exonucleolysis and Replication by T7 DNA Polymerase Studied using Optical Tweezers and AFS™

The paper “Switching between Exonucleolysis and Replication by T7 DNA Polymerase Ensures High Fidelity” has recently been published in the Biophysical Journal using LUMICKS’ AFS™ technology and optical tweezers. We would like to congratulate all the authors!

In the paper by Hoekstra et al., optical tweezers and AFS™ were used to study the kinetic interplay between replication and proofreading by probing how the effect of DNA-duplex stability affects the bacteriophage T7 DNA polymerase replication process. They found that DNA polymerase dissociation-mediated DNA transfer is the allocated pathway for error correction and that this is a stochastic process prone to false positives to avoid the contrary, rather than a precise control mechanism. This “…ensures the high-fidelity replication of the bacteriophage T7 genome”.