CHEM669 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Polynucleotide, Complementary Dna, Pyrimidine
8 Apr 2017
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Document Summary
In their primary structures both are linear polymers (multiple chemical units) composed of monomers (single chemical units), called nucleotides. Cellular rnas range in length from less than one hundred to many thousands of nucleotides. Cellular dna molecules can be as long as several hundred million nucleotides. These large dna units in association with proteins can be stained with dyes and visualized in the light microscope as chromosomes. Dna and rna each consists of only four different nucleotides. All nucleotides have a common structure: a phosphategroup linked by a phosphoester bond to a pentose (a five-carbon sugar molecule) that in turn is linked to an organic base(figure 4-1a). The only other difference in the nucleotides of dna and. Rna is that one of the four organic bases differs between the two polymers. The bases adenine, guanine, and cytosine are found in both dna and rna; thymine is found only in dna, and uracil is found only in rna.
