In a typical human cell, dna polymerase synthesizes dna at a rate of approximately 50 nucleotides per second. human chromosome 1 contains about 250 million base pairs. if a single origin of replication were used, how long would it take the cell to copy this chromosome?

It would take over 57 days.

Explanation:

To arrive at the conclusion, I had to perform several simple calculations. I'm going to detail them here as a part of the explanation.

If Human chromosome 1 contains 250 million base pairs and the DNA polymerase synthesizes DNA at a rate of 50 nucleotides per second, we should divide the first number (250 million) by the second (50).

250,000,000 / 50 = 5,000,000.

This means it takes about 5 million seconds to copy this chromosome. Now I'm going to divide this number by 60 to see how many minutes it takes.

5,000,000 / 60 = 83,333.33.

So it takes over 83,333 minutes to duplicate this chromosome. If we want to know how many hours this equals to, we have to repeat the process and divide the number by 60.

83,333.33 / 60 = 1,388.88.

To know how many days it takes to copy this chromosome, we divide this last number by 24.

1,388.88 / 24 = 57.87.

In conclusion, after performing the calculations based on the data given in the question, and only taking into account ONE SINGLE origin of replication (when, in reality, eukaryotes' DNA polymerases have many origins of replication), it would take the DNA polymerase almost 2 months to replicate Human chromosome 1.