Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, man.

Oh, my.

And so, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 34.

DNA, structure and function. And I'm your host, James Fodor.

In this episode, I'm going to look at DNA and genes, and particularly talk about the structure of DNA, the double helix structure, and how that's put together by the nucleotide-based pairs and how that relates to the genetic code.

We'll also discuss the central dogma of molecular biology, which is basically that DNA translates to RNA,

which then makes proteins. And in doing so, we'll look at the separate processes of DNA replication,

DNA-R-N-R-A transcription, and also RNA-to-protein translation. Now, this episode has some prerequisites,

if you will. It's recommended that you have listened to episode 10 about the cell and

episode 18, biochemistry basics. I think those episodes themselves also have some prerequisites.

But basically some background about the structure of the cell and some knowledge of biomolecules and polymer chains and stuff like that would be very helpful for this episode.

Okay, so there's a lot to go through in this episode, so let's get started.

First of all, we'll talk about the structure of DNA.

So first of all, DNA is an acronym, which stands for

deoxyribonucleic acid, which is the name for the monomer, that is the molecules, that make

up the DNA structure. Each of these little monomer molecules are called nucleotides,

and as I said, they're a class of organic monomers.

They make up both DNA and RNA, actually.

Each nucleotide has a particular structure, and then you sort of link them all together in a big long chain to form a polymer.

Remember this from the biochemistry episode, the many monomers go into make a polymer.

The DNA itself is a polymer, but the

nucleotides are the monomers that make up the polymer. But each nucleotide, the monomer,

...