Estimating DNA Polymerase Numbers in Eukaryotic Cells

[Damascus Road]

Greetings all,

I have a problem where I am asked to estimate the number of DNA polymerase in a eukaryotic cell. The sub-question prior to this asked me to find what fraction of the total DNA of a fly was shown in a micrograph in my book.

How do I go about estimating this? Is it 2 for each "loop" ?

 

[Damascus Road]

yowza

 

[Ygggdrasil]

One way to go about making some guess at this number would be to calculate the minimum number of polymerase molecules to copy the entire genome in the span of the doubling time (or the length of the S-phase for eukaryotes). For this, you would need to know the amount of time that the cell has to replicate its DNA, the average speed at which a DNA polymerase can synthesize DNA, and the size of the genome.