Short Abstracts – Session V

Replication of eukaryotic genomes is a tightly controlled process: replication initiates at several thousand origins, whose cis-acting sequences and trans-acting proteins have been best characterized in the yeast S. cerevisiae. Despite the early successes in the identification of microbial eukaryotic origins, the available methods for origin identification in mammalian DNA have lead to the detailed characterization of only few origins, mostly because the yeast sequence determinants (ARS consensus sequences) do not seem to be evolutionarily conserved.