Some of the elements necessary to support life on Earth are widely known - oxygen, carbon and water, to name a few. Just as important in the existence of life as any other component is the presence of ...

Mammalian cells have enzymes to convert adenosine to inosine by deamination and inosine to hypoxanthine by phosphorolysis, but they do not possess the enzymes necessary to form the free base, adenine, ...

Physicists have shown that one of the building blocks of DNA and RNA, adenine, has an unexpectedly variable range of ionization energies along its reaction pathways. Early Earth's atmosphere provided ...

In the double helix structure of DNA, thymine forms a base pair with adenine through two hydrogen bonds. This specific pairing is known as complementary base pairing and is essential for the stability ...

DNA is the genetic material used by every living organism. But, in a few edge cases, the four bases of DNA—adenine, thymidine, cytosine, and guanine—undergo chemical modifications. And in viruses, ...

This image illustrates the chemical structure of a purine molecule, highlighting the numbering of the carbon and nitrogen atoms. The purine structure consists of a pyrimidine ring (positions 1 to 6) ...

Cytosine bases here and there in DNA are famously decorated with methyl groups, chemical modifications that silence genes so that specific cells express only certain, appropriate DNA sequences. This ...