Concatemers are frequently the result of rolling circle replication, and may be seen in the late stage of infection of bacteria by phages.
[1] During active infection, some species of viruses have been shown to replicate their genetic material via the formation of concatemers.
These long concatemers are subsequently cleaved between the pac-1 and pac-2 regions by ribozymes when the genome is packaged into individual virions.
Bacteriophage T4 replicating DNA was labeled with tritiated thymidine and examined by autoradiography.
When assembling concatemers from synthetic oligonucleotides, increasing salt concentration to 200 mM was found to be a major optimizing factor due to its ability to enhance ionic strength, which hastened the formation of concatemers.