Clamp is a character in the television show Galaktik Football.
This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.
Sliding clamps are ring-shaped proteins that encircle DNA and enable polymerases—enzymes that replicate DNA—to relax and regain their hold on DNA strands without losing their place, despite the considerable torque that results from the production of double-helical DNA.
There, they used x-ray diffraction to reveal the structure of a sliding clamp from a yeast species as it is bound to a clamp loader, a five-subunit protein motor that both opens and closes the clamp and targets it toward freshly unwound DNA strands that are ready for replication.
The clamp loader recognizes the junction where DNA changes from double stranded to single stranded, and it couples this recognition with a structure that forces the clamp loader to release the clamp from around the DNA.