ABSTRACT
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Nucleic acids are composed of nucleotides, the building blocks, and essentially contain a vecarbon sugar, a phosphate group, and nitrogen-containing bases. There are two major groups of nucleic acids, DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid; and RNA, or ribonucleic acid. DNA serves as the genetic material, in other words, genes are made up of DNA. The DNA molecule has four major building blocks, adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G), attached to a deoxyribose sugar. RNA is also composed of nucleotide building blocks, with one letter difference: it uses A, C, and G, but uracil (U) instead of thymine, all attached to a ribose sugar. Both DNA and RNA are polar compounds due to the many negative charges they contain in the phosphate groups of the sugar-phosphate backbone of each DNA and RNA strand [1].
