Adenine

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.

Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is a nucleic acid molecule that remains a single nucleotide. Unlike a DNA or RNA nucleotide, the ATP nucleotide has three phosphate groups attached to its ribose sugar. All living beings run their cells on ATP. The universal battery, ATP is an energy-storing molecule.

DNA is made of chemical building blocks called nucleotides. These building blocks are made of three parts: a phosphate group, a sugar group and one of four types of nitrogen bases. To form a strand of DNA, nucleotides are linked into chains, with the phosphate and sugar groups alternating.

In turn, each nucleotide is itself made up of three primary components: a nitrogen-containing region known as a nitrogenous base, a carbon-based sugar molecule called deoxyribose, and a phosphorus-containing region known as a phosphate group attached to the sugar molecule (Figure 1).

The genetic information stored in an organism’s DNA contains the instructions for all the proteins the organism will ever synthesize. In eucaryotes, DNA is contained in the cell nucleus. A DNA Molecule Consists of Two Complementary Chains of Nucleotides. The Structure of DNA Provides a Mechanism for Heredity.

DNA is the information molecule. It stores instructions for making other large molecules, called proteins. These instructions are stored inside each of your cells, distributed among 46 long structures called chromosomes. These chromosomes are made up of thousands of shorter segments of DNA, called genes.

Each DNA strand is composed of nucleotides—units made up of a sugar (deoxyribose), a phosphate group, and a nitrogenous base. Each strand of DNA is a polynucleotide composed of units called nucleotides. A nucleotide has three components: a sugar molecule, a phosphate group, and a nitrogenous base.

The Building Blocks of DNA DNA has three types of chemical component: phosphate, a sugar called deoxyribose, and four nitrogenous bases—adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. Two of the bases, adenine and guanine, have a double-ring structure characteristic of a type of chemical called a purine.

nuclear DNA

DNA is called the blueprint of life because it is the instruction manual to create, grow, function and reproduce life on Earth similar to a blueprint of a house. The proteins that DNA enables the encoding of come together to forms cells, tissues, and organs.

deoxyribose

Both DNA and RNA are built with a sugar backbone, but whereas the sugar in DNA is called deoxyribose (left in image), the sugar in RNA is called simply ribose (right in image).

RNA has been found in a panoply of human body fluids: blood, urine, tears, cerebrospinal fluid, breast milk, amniotic fluid, seminal fluid and others.