Ch 2.5.4 Nucleic Acids - UGH, These Two...

Nucleic Acids - UGH, These Two...

While lipids may be the scapegoat and everyone hates them even though they’re super important and you wouldn’t even exist without them, nucleic acids are the Beyonce of the macromolecules. Sure they do something but they get so much credit for doing so little. Yes, they store genetic information. That’s it. GREATJOB NUCLEIC ACIDS FOR LITERALLY SITTING THERE! In their defense, that’s just DNA, the super overrated nucleic acid, that barely does anything. It stores information and then it...stores information. Once it’s done storing information, it stores information. Or gives you cancer. Yay DNA! Its cousin RNA is slightly more productive. It helps to read information and make something productive (proteins) out of the info. So it’s basically trying to salvage the image of nucleic acids by doing a little more than just sit there. 

Being nucleic acids (that’s what the NA stands for in DNA and RNA), they are both composed of monomers known as nucleotides. Each nucleotide itself is a polymer of three things: a phosphate group, a five-carbon sugar, and a nitrogenous base. The phosphate group is exactly the same for both DNA and RNA because a phosphate group can’t be different and still be a phosphate group. The sugar is almost exactly the same and is responsible for the first letter of the nucleic acid’s name. In RNA you have the sugar ribose and in DNA, you have deoxyribose. Deoxyribose is only different from ribose in the fact that in one specific location, you are missing an oxygen, hence being deoxyribose. Then there are five nitrogenous bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil. The first three listed are found in both types of nucleic acids; thymine is found only in DNA while uracil exists only in RNA. In reality, thymine is just a slightly fancier form of uracil so that’s why they’re practically the same.