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A nucleoside triphosphate is a nucleoside containing a nitrogenous base bound to a 5-carbon sugar (either ribose or deoxyribose), with three phosphate groups bound to the sugar. [1] They are the molecular precursors of both DNA and RNA, which are chains of nucleotides made through the processes of DNA replication and transcription. [2]
The code is read by copying stretches of DNA into the related nucleic acid RNA in a process called transcription. Within cells, DNA is organized into long sequences called chromosomes. During cell division these chromosomes are duplicated in the process of DNA replication, providing each cell its own complete set of chromosomes.
The convention for a nucleic acid sequence is to list the nucleotides as they occur from the 5' end to the 3' end of the polymer chain, where 5' and 3' refer to the numbering of carbons around the ribose ring which participate in forming the phosphate diester linkages of the chain. Such a sequence is called the primary structure of the biopolymer.
A furanose (sugar-ring) molecule with carbon atoms labeled using standard notation. The 5′ is upstream; the 3′ is downstream. DNA and RNA are synthesized in the 5′-to-3′ direction. Directionality, in molecular biology and biochemistry, is the end-to-end chemical orientation of a single strand of nucleic acid.
Transcription is the process of copying a segment of DNA into RNA for the purpose of gene expression. Some segments of DNA are transcribed into RNA molecules that can encode proteins, called messenger RNA (mRNA). Other segments of DNA are transcribed into RNA molecules called non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs).
The RNA chain is synthesized from the 5' end to the 3' end as the 3'-hydroxyl group of the last ribonucleotide in the chain acts as a nucleophile and launches a hydrophilic attack on the 5'-triphosphate of the incoming ribonucleotide, releasing pyrophosphate as a by-[6] product. Due to the physical properties of the nucleotides, the backbone of ...
This arrangement of two nucleotides binding together across the double helix (from six-carbon ring to six-carbon ring) is called a Watson-Crick base pair. DNA with high GC-content is more stable than DNA with low GC-content. A Hoogsteen base pair (hydrogen bonding the 6-carbon ring to the 5-carbon ring) is a rare variation of base-pairing. [26]
This process is called promoter escape, and is another step at which regulatory elements can act to accelerate or slow the transcription process. Similarly, protein and nucleic acid factors can associate with the elongation complex and modulate the rate at which the polymerase moves along the DNA template.