Speed of DNA Replication

The Genome of complex eukaryotes is huge and the process of DNA Replication should be incredibly fast. It is amazing that a Chromosome of 250 million pair of bases can be replicated in several hours. The speed of DNA replication for the humans is about 50 nucleotides per second per replication fork (low speed comparing to the speed of the bacterial DNA Replication).But the human Genome can be copied only in a few hours because because many replication forks take place at the some time (multiple initiation sites).

The speed of DNA replication in bacteria is much longer (about 1000 nucleotides per second) and that is a reason why during the process of bacterial replication the rate of errors is much higher.