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Computational Structural Biology: Winter 2024
Nucleic acids
Nucleic acids are biopolymers, or biomolecules, that are essential to all known forms of life.
They are composed of monomers, which are nucleotides. Those nucleotides are made of three components:
a 5-carbon sugar, a phosphate group and a nitrogenous base.
If the sugar is a simple ribose, the polymer is RNA (ribonucleic acid);
if the sugar is derived from ribose as deoxyribose, the polymer is DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).
Nucleic acids are the most important of all biomolecules. They are found in abundance in all living things, where they function to create and encode and then store information in the nucleus of every living cell of every life-form organism on Earth. In turn, they function to transmit and express that information inside and outside the cell nucleus.
The encoded information is contained and conveyed via the nucleic acid sequence, which provides the "ladder-step" ordering of nucleotides within the molecules of RNA and DNA.
Lecture Notes
Further Reading
- Structural genomics of RNA, Doudna, Nature Struct. Biol., 2000
- Recent findings in the modern RNA world, Meli et al, Int Microbiol ,2001
- **Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids, Watson and Crick, Nature, 1953
- Classification of RNA base pairs Leontis and Westhof, RNA, 2001.
- Stitching together RNA tertiary architectures, D. Patel, J. Mol. Biol., 1999.
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