Shape and Structure
This is the shape of a DNA molecule, often described as a twisted ladder.
What is a double helix?
This is the name for the smaller subunits that make up a long DNA molecule.
What is a nucleotide?
There are this many different kinds of bases found in DNA.
What is four?
This is the term for a section of DNA that codes for one unique protein.
What is a gene?
This is the type of molecule that DNA is, one that stores the information cells need.
What is a nucleic acid?
These two scientists are credited with first suggesting the double helix structure of DNA, in 1953.
Who are Watson and Crick?
A nucleotide is made up of these three parts.
What are a sugar, a phosphate, and a base?
These are the four bases found in DNA.
What are adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine?
DNA is compared to this everyday form of communication, made of letters placed in a meaningful order.
What are words, or a sentence?
This is the general term for what DNA provides to a cell, similar to a set of instructions or a plan.
What is information?
These two molecules make up the sides, or rails, of the DNA ladder.
What are phosphate and sugar (deoxyribose)?
This is approximately how many nucleotides make up the DNA found in each of your cells.
What is six billion?
In DNA, adenine always pairs with this base.
What is thymine?
These two features of the nucleotides in a gene determine what kind of protein gets built.
Which nucleotides are present and what order they are in?
Cells need information from DNA in order to build this, the complex parts needed to live, grow, and reproduce.
What is cellular machinery?
This is the name of the sugar found in the sides of the DNA ladder.
What is deoxyribose?
This part of a nucleotide forms the rungs of the DNA ladder, rather than the side rails.
What is the base?
In DNA, cytosine always pairs with this base.
What is guanine?
This is what could happen to a protein if the order of nucleotides within a gene gets scrambled or changed.
What is a different protein could be built, or no protein at all?
This young sea creature is the textbook example of an organism that needs new information to grow new kinds of cells.
What is a sea star larva?
This is the term for a pair of bases that make up a single rung of the DNA ladder.
What is a base pair?
This is the term for a molecule, like DNA, that is built from many repeating nucleotide subunits.
What is a nucleic acid?
This is the reason the textbook gives for why bases can only pair together in these limited ways.
What is their chemical structure?
In the textbook word example, this is what happens to the meaning of the word cat if its letters are scrambled to spell tca.
What is it loses its meaning, or provides no information?
According to the textbook, this is who built the information rich molecule DNA into the first living things.
Who is God?