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Nucleic acid nomenclature



Molecular biologists use several shorthand terms when referring to nucleic acid molecules, such as DNA and RNA, collectively referred to as nucleic acid nomenclature.

The most common is the representation of the base pairs as letters—an adenine nucleotide is abbreviated as A, guanine as G, cytosine as C, thymine as T, and in RNA, uracil as U.

 

Additionally, the positions of the carbons in the ribose sugar that forms the backbone of the nucleic acid chain are numbered, and are used to indicate the direction of nucleic acids (5'->3' versus 3'->5'), see directionality.

See also


 
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Nucleic_acid_nomenclature". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia.
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