Why do cells replicate dna

The two separated strands will act as templates for making the new strands of DNA. As a result of their different orientations, the two strands are replicated differently: An illustration to show replication of the leading and lagging strands of DNA.

Related Content:. What is a genome? What is DNA? What is a cell? Imagine slicing yourself down the middle and splitting yourself in half, and then using each half of you as a template to recreate the other half.

That's the biology behind it, but the bottom line is that DNA is replicated in order to reproduce itself. Why does DNA replication need to occur? Mar 24, DNA is like the instruction manual for building and operating a cell.

Explanation: DNA replication needs to occur because existing cells divide to produce new cells. Hope this helps! Student Voices. Creature Cast.

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Saltwater Science. Microbe Matters. You have authorized LearnCasting of your reading list in Scitable. Do you want to LearnCast this session? This article has been posted to your Facebook page via Scitable LearnCast. Change LearnCast Settings. Scitable Chat. And during that process of cell division, all of the information in a cell has to be copied, and it has to be copied perfectly.

And so DNA is a molecule that can be replicated to make almost perfect copies of itself. Which is all the more amazing considering that there are almost three billion base pairs of DNA to be copied.