Learning Strategies in Biochemistry:
Nucleic Acids

Revised 2008/05/22

Essential Review

From Organic Chemistry

If you are not familiar with the following topics, look them up in the index of your organic chemistry text, and review them thoroughly:

  1. phosphate esters, including structure, synthesis, and hydrolysis;
  2. sugar structure and stereochemistry, including Hayworth projections;
  3. hydrogen bonding;
  4. tautomerism.

Essential Memory Work: Nucleotide Components and Links

Sorry, but there's no way around it: if you are going to be able to read and retain any material in nucleotide biochemistry, you'll just have to memorize the the basic structures and bonding patterns in nucleotides. Specifically, memorize

  1. the structures of the five most common bases, A, T, G, C, and U,
  2. the structures of the sugars ribose and 2'-deoxyribose, in Hayworth projections, including stereochemistry,
  3. the structure of the phosphate linkage (a derivative of the phosphate ion, PO4- ),
  4. the hydrogen bonding patterns found in B-DNA,
  5. the ring numbering systems for the bases and sugars,
  6. the positions of the bonds that link base, sugar, and phosphate to form nucleotides,
  7. the meanings of these terms: nucleoside; nucleoside mono-, di-, and triphosphate; and nucleotide.

This illustration may help with the last task:

The main goal of this memory work:
Be able to build a nucleotide from a description of its components, making all the proper links between components. For an example, see the Sample Quizzes below.

The authors of your text, and your instructor as well, will quickly start treating you like a biochemist, which means that they will use the names of nucleotides and their components freely, and will assume that you can translate names into structures automatically. Refresh you memory on the structures regularly, especially before each exam. There's nothing more frustrating than not being able to get started on a ten-point exam problem simply because you can't come up with a common structure.

Quiz

(At first class on this topic)

I will provide a list of components and a description of a nucleotide composed of them. Draw the structure of the nucleotide.

Sample Quizzes

Sample 1: Draw the full structure of the deoxytrinucleotide TCGp.

Sample 2: Draw adenine and thymine joined by hydrogen bonds as in B-DNA. Complete the drawing of the two nucleotides by adding deoxyribose to each base and then adding a 5'-phosphate group to each nucleoside.

Topics

Biochemistry Resources