DNA is fundamental to the biology of all life on Earth, but how many of us actually know what it is or what it's made of?

In the late nineteenth century, a German biochemist found the nucleic acids, long-chain polymers of nucleotides, were made up of sugar, phosphoric acid, and several nitrogen-containing bases.

Polymers are made of monomers, and in DNA, these monomers are called nucleotides or nucleobases. The enzymes that handle DNA molecules are often called "polymerases," but the -ase suffix denotes ...

Most DNA molecules consist of two polymers (double-stranded) of four nucleotides that each consist of a nucleobase, the carbohydrate deoxyribose and a phosphate group, where the carbohydrate and ...

DNA molecules are composed of four nucleotides, and these nucleotides are linked together much like the words in a sentence. Together, all of the DNA "sentences" within a cell contain the ...