Premal H. Patel and Lawrence A. Loeb are at the Joseph Gottstein Memorial Cancer Laboratory, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington, USA, 98195-7705.
DNA polymerases play a central role in maintenance of genetic information, and the structures of polymerases in complex with DNA and dNTP provide valuable insights into mechanisms utilized by DNA polymerases to achieve high fidelity. Comparison of several high resolution complexes of DNA polymerases bound with relevant substrates indicates that the two major families of polymerases function by very similar mechanisms.
