The building blocks or monomers of nucleic acid molecules are called nucleotides. Nucleotides consist of three main components: a phosphate group, a five-carbon sugar (either ribose in RNA or deoxyribose in DNA), and a nitrogenous base (either a purine or a pyrimidine). These nucleotides link together through phosphodiester bonds to form the long chains of DNA and RNA molecules.
For example, in DNA, the four types of nitrogenous bases found in nucleotides are adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G). In RNA, uracil (U) replaces thymine. Each nucleotide sequence carries genetic information and plays a crucial role in protein synthesis, genetic expression, and various cellular functions.
