Three hypotheses were formally possible for the distribution of parental and newly synthesized material among the products of DNA replication: conservative replication, in which the original duplex is preserved intact and an entirely new duplex is built alongside it; dispersive replication, in which each daughter duplex contains old and new segments interspersed along both strands in no fixed proportion; and semi-conservative replication, in which each daughter duplex consists of one intact parental strand paired with one newly synthesized strand. The Meselson–Stahl experiment discriminated among these outcomes and established that DNA replication is semi-conservative. The concept belongs to molecular biology and the theory of DNA replication, and it is framed at the level of the replication product rather than the enzymatic mechanism that generates it.
Three hypotheses were formally possible for the distribution of parental and newly synthesized material among the products of DNA replication: conservative replication, in which the original duplex i…