If there is a mechanism for recognizing loose ends of DNA, what about the ends of every eukaryotic chromosome? They are linear chromosomes, so they have ends, right? What prevents the double-strand-br...If there is a mechanism for recognizing loose ends of DNA, what about the ends of every eukaryotic chromosome? They are linear chromosomes, so they have ends, right? What prevents the double-strand-break repair systems from mis-recognizing them all as broken DNA and concatenating all of the chromosomes together? Interestingly, the answer to this question is intimately tied up with the answer to the problem of end- replication, which was very briefly alluded to in our description of replication.
