preview

Dna Analysis On Dna And Dna

Satisfactory Essays

Introduction DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. DNA is the genetic material of life and is made up of monomers called nucleotides. Nucleotides are monomers made up of a phosphate group, a sugar, and a nitrogenous base. (Freeman, 2014) The way that DNA is able to store information is in its nitrogenous bases. There are four different types of nitrogenous bases that DNA strands contain: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), thymine (T). These nitrogenous bases in DNA are each different, and each one only pairs with a certain one. Adenine (A) only pairs with thymine (T) and guanine (G) only pairs with cytosine (C). The sequence of the nitrogenous bases pairs is what stores the information in the DNA. The secondary structure of DNA is a double helix. The DNA is folded into its double helix shape when hydrogen bonds form between the two strands of antiparallel DNA. The double helix shape is what allows the DNA to easily split and be copied by adding nitrogenous base pairs to the split strands. This produces an identical copy of the original DNA molecule. Each new DNA molecule contains one strand of the original DNA and one newly created strand.
(Freeman, 2014) Mutations are changes that occur in the DNA sequence. Mutations range in size; they can affect anywhere from a single DNA building block (base pair) to a large segment of a chromosome that includes multiple genes. (U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2016) Mutations happen frequently in DNA

Get Access