Search the Kids Internet
Encyclopedia > Purine
Article Content
Purine
A Purine is a bicyclic organic compound. Two of the bases in nucleic acids, adenine and guanine, are purines. In DNA, these bases form hydrogen bonds with their complementary pyrimidines thymine and cytosine.
purine pyrimidine A T G C
In RNA, the complement of A is uracil instead of thymine:
purine pyrimidine A U G C
These hydrogen bonding modes are for classical Watson-Crick base pairing. Other hydrogen bonding modes are seen in both DNA and RNA, although the additional 3'-hydroxyl group of RNA expands the configurations through which RNA can form hydrogen bonds.
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
|
Search Encyclopedia
|
Featured Article
|