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What does DNA stand for?
Deoxyribonucleic acid
The name deoxyribonucleic acid describes the molecule piece by piece. It is an acid found in the cell nucleus, built on a sugar called ribose that is missing one oxygen atom, hence deoxyribose. Each strand is a chain of units, and every unit carries a phosphate, that sugar, and one of four bases: adenine, thymine, guanine or cytosine. Two strands wind around each other in a double helix, held together by pairing rules in which adenine always faces thymine and guanine always faces cytosine. That pairing is the whole trick, because it means each strand carries the information needed to rebuild the other, which is how a cell copies its genome before dividing. The order of the bases spells out instructions for building proteins. The structure was worked out in the early 1950s using X-ray diffraction images produced by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling, interpreted alongside chemical evidence about base ratios.
RNA keeps the oxygen that DNA lacks and uses uracil in place of thymine.
Why the other answers are wrong
- Deoxyribose nuclear acid. The word is nucleic, referring to the nucleus of the cell, not nuclear in the atomic sense.
- Double nucleic acid. This mixes up the double helix shape with the chemical name, which describes the sugar instead.
- Dinucleic acid. No such compound; the prefix di would suggest two of something rather than a missing oxygen.
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