the.com/nucleotide
Life's alphabet letter — spell enough of them right and you get a species.
means A nucleotide is the small molecular building block — a sugar, a phosphate, and a nitrogen-containing base — that links together in long chains to form DNA and RNA.
from From 'nucleus' (the cell's core, from Latin 'nux' meaning 'nut' — the nucleus being the kernel inside the cell) plus '-ide,' a chemistry suffix marking it as a compound. Coined once scientists realized these molecules were the chemical residents of the cell's nucleus, bundled into the threads of chromatin — the word names them by their address before anyone understood their job as life's instruction-writers.
- building blocks
- sugar, phosphate, and a nitrogen base glued together
- just four letters
- A, T, C, G spell every human trait
- also energy currency
- ATP is a nucleotide moonlighting as fuel
- typo tolerance
- most mutations get silently proofread and fixed