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Deoxy-Ribonucleotides and Watson-Crick Basepairs
Terminology
DNA is a polymer made up of repeated units, nucleotides, comprising three components:
a sugar (2'-deoxyribose), phosphate and one of four heretocyclic bases.
The bases are:
adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), cytosine (C).
The term nucleoside stands for base + sugar (without phosphate).
The names of the nucleosides are:
adenosine (A), thymidine (T), guanosine (G), cytidine (C).
or more precisely deoxyadenosine, .....
Individual nucleotides (not in DNA) are often called deoxyadenosine-5'-phosphate, for example,
or like the well-known dATP deoxyadenosine-5'-triphosphate.
A terminology of nucleotides as parts of DNA is deoxythymidylate, ...... .
However, it is common practice to adopt the nucleoside names given above for the nucleotides as well. This is done, for example, in the Protein Data Bank format description.
A PDF version of the PDB format description can be obtained from http://www.imb-jena.de/biol_local.html.
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