an autodidact meets a dilettante…

Canto: Ok we talked about base pairs at the end of dialogue 1. A (nucleo)base pair is, duh, a pairing of nucleobases. There are four types of base in DNA – adenine and thymine, which always pair together, and the other pairing, cytosine and guanine.

Jacinta: Please explain – what’s a nucleobase, what do they do, and why do they come in pairs?

Canto: Well, let’s see, how do we begin… DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid…

Jacinta: So it’s an acid. But bases are like the opposite of acids aren’t they? So how can an acid be constructed of its opposite?

Canto: Look, I can’t answer that right now – I haven’t a clue – but let’s keep investigating the structure and function, and the answers might come. So, you’ll know that there was a battle in the 1950s to elucidate the structure of DNA, and it was found to form a double helix two strands of – I don’t know what – connected to each other in a twisted sort of way by, I think, those base pairs connected by hydrogen bonds. Anyway, here’s a fairly typical explanation, from Nature Education, which we’ll try to make sense of:

The double helix describes the appearance of double-stranded DNA, which is composed of two linear strands that run opposite to each other, or anti-parallel, and twist together. Each DNA strand within the double helix is a long, linear molecule made of smaller units called nucleotides that form a chain. The chemical backbones of the double helix are made up of sugar and phosphate molecules that are connected by chemical bonds, known as sugar-phosphate backbones. The two helical strands are connected through interactions between pairs of nucleotides, also called base pairs. Two types of base pairing occur: nucleotide A pairs with T, and nucleotide C pairs with G.

Jacinta: So I think I have a problem with this description. I think I need a picture, fully labelled. So the two strands themselves are made up of nucleotides, and the connections between them are made up of bonded sugar and phosphate molecules? But the strands are connected, via sugar and phosphate, in particular ways – ‘through interactions’ – which only allow A to pair with T, and C to pair with G?.

Canto: I think that’s right. Maybe we can find a picture.

Jacinta: Ok, so we got it completely wrong. The backbone, of sugar-phosphate, is the outer, twisted strand, or two of them, like the vertical bars of a twisted ladder, or the toprails of a spiral staircase, and the base pairs are like the stairs themselves, made of two separate parts, the bases, bonded together by hydrogen…

Canto: Forget the description, the picture above is worth all our words. It also tells us that the DNA molecule is around 2 nanometres wide. That’s two billionths of a metre. And 3.4 nanometres long for a full twist of the double helix, I think.

Jacinta: Whateva. There’s also this claim that the two strands are ‘anti-parallel’. It looks to me as if they’re simply parallel, but twisted. What does this mean? Is it significant?

Canto: I don’t know – maybe we’ll find out next time. I’m already exhausted.

Jacinta: …….