You really can tell, just by looking at it, how important and amazing it is.

It's pretty much the most complicated molecule that exists, and potentially the most important one.

It's so complex that we didn't even know for sure what it looked like

until about 60 years ago.

So multifariously awesome that if you took all of it from just one of our cells and untangled it,

it would be taller than me.

Now consider that there are probably 50 trillion cells in my body right now.

Laid end to end, the DNA in those cells would stretch to the sun.

Not once...

but 600 times!

Mind blown yet?

Hey, you wanna make one?

Of course you know I'm talking about deoxyribonucleic acid, known to its friends as DNA.

DNA is what stores our genetic instructions -- the information that programs all of our

cell's activities.

It's a 6-billion letter code that provides the assembly instructions for everything that

you are.

And it does the same thing for pretty much every other living thing.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you're human.

In which case every body cell, or somatic cell, in you right now, has 46

chromosomes each containing one big DNA molecule.

These chromosomes are packed together tightly with proteins in the nucleus of the cell.

DNA is a nucleic acid.

And so is its cousin, which we'll also be talking about, ribonucleic acid, or RNA.

Now if you can make your mind do this, remember all the way back to episode 3, where we talked

about all the important biological molecules:

carbohydrates, lipids and proteins. That ring a bell?

Well nucleic acids are the fourth major group of biological molecules, and for my money

they have the most complicated job of all.

Structurally they're polymers, which means that each one is made up

of many small, repeating molecular units.

In DNA, these small units are called nucleotides. Link them together and you have yourself a

polynucleotide.

Now before we actually put these tiny parts together to build a

DNA molecule like some microscopic piece of Ikea furniture, let's

first take a look at what makes up each nucleotide.

We're gonna need three things:

1. A five-carbon sugar molecule

2. A phosphate group

3. One of four nitrogen bases

DNA gets the first part its name from our first ingredient, the sugar

molecule, which is called deoxyribose.

But all the really significant stuff, the genetic coding that makes you YOU,

is found among the four nitrogenous bases:

adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G).

It's important to note that in living organisms, DNA doesn't exist

as a single polynucleotide molecule, but rather a pair of molecules that

are held tightly together.

They're like an intertwined, microscopic, double spiral staircase.

Basically, just a ladder, but twisted. The famous Double Helix.

And like any good structure, we have to have a main support.

In DNA, the sugars and phosphates bond together to form twin backbones.

These sugar-phosphate bonds run down each side of the helix but, chemically, in opposite directions.

In other words, if you look at each of the sugar-phosphate backbones, you'll see that

one appears upside-down in relation to the other.

One strand begins at the top with the first phosphate connected to the sugar molecule's

5th carbon and then ending where the next phosphate would go, with a free end at the

sugar's 3rd carbon.

This creates a pattern called 5' (5 prime) and 3' (3 prime).

I've always thought of the deoxyribose with an arrow, with the oxygen as the point.

It always 'points' from from 3' to 5'.

Now on the other strand, it's exactly the opposite.

It begins up top with a free end at the sugar's 3rd carbon and the phosphates connect to the

sugars' fifth carbons all the way down.

And it ends at the bottom with a phosphate.

And you've probably figured this out already, but this is called the 3' to 5' direction.

Now it is time to make ourselves one of these famous double helices.

These two long chains are linked by the nitrogenous bases via relatively weak hydrogen bonds.

But they can't be just any pair of nitrogenous bases.

Thankfully, when it comes to figuring out what part goes where, all you have to do is

remember is that if one nucleotide has an adenine base (A),

only thymine (T) can be its counterpart (A-T).

Likewise, guanine (G) can only bond with cytosine [C] (G-C).

These bonded nitrogenous bases are called base pairs.

The G-C pairing has three hydrogen bonds, making it slightly stronger than the A-T base-pair,

which only has two bonds.

It's the order of these four nucleobases or the Base Sequence that allows your DNA

to create you.

So, AGGTCCATG means something completely different as a base sequence than, say, TTCAGTCG.

Human chromosome 1, the largest of all our chromosomes, contains a single molecule of

DNA with 247 million base pairs.

If you printed all of the letters of chromosome 1 into a book, it would be about 200,000 pages

long.

And each of your somatic cells has 46 DNA molecules tightly packed into its nucleus

-- that's one for each of your chromosomes.

Put all 46 molecules together and we're talking about roughly 6 billion base pairs

.... In every cell!

This is the longest book I've ever read.

It's about 1,000 pages long.

If we were to fill it with our DNA sequence, we'd need about 10,000 of them to fit our

entire genome.

POP QUIZ!!!

Let's test your skills using a very short strand of DNA.

I'll give you one base sequence -- you give me the base sequence that appears on

the other strand.

Okay, here goes:

5' -- AGGTCCG -- 3'

And... time's up.

The answer is:

3' -- TCCAGGC -- 5'

See how that works? It's not super complicated.

Since each nitrogenous base only has one counterpart, you can use one base sequence to predict what

its matching sequence is going to look like.

So could I make the same base sequence with a strand of that "other" nucleic acid,

RNA?

No, you could not.

RNA is certainly similar to its cousin DNA -- it has a sugar-phosphate backbone with

nucleotide bases attached to it.

But there are THREE major differences:

1. RNA is a single-stranded molecule -- no double helix here.

2. The sugar in RNA is ribose, which has one more oxygen atom than deoxyribose, hence the

whole starting with an R instead of a D thing.

3. Also, RNA does not contain thymine. Its fourth nucleotide is the base uracil, so it

bonds with adenine instead.

RNA is super important in the production of our proteins, and you'll see later that

it has a crucial role in the replication of DNA.

But first...

Biolo-graphies!

Yes, plural this week!

Because when you start talking about something as multitudinously awesome and elegant as

DNA, you have to wonder:

WHO figured all of this out?

And how big was their brain?

Well unsurprisingly, it actually took a lot of different brains, in a lot of different

countries

and nearly a hundred years of thinking to do it.

The names you usually hear when someone asks who discovered DNA are James Watson and Francis

Crick.

But that's BUNK. They did not discover DNA.

Nor did they discover that DNA contained genetic information.

DNA itself was discovered in 1869 by a Swiss biologist named Friedrich Miescher.

His deal was studying white blood cells.

And he got those white blood cells in the most horrible way you could possibly imagine,

from collecting used bandages from a nearby hospital.

It's for science he did it!

He bathed the cells in warm alcohol to remove the lipids,

then he set enzymes loose on them to digest the proteins.

What was left, after all that, was snotty gray stuff that he knew must be some new kind

of biological substance.

He called it nuclein, but was later to become known as nucleic acid.

But Miescher didn't know what its role was or what it looked like.

One of those scientists who helped figure that out was Rosalind Franklin, a young biophysicist

in London nearly a hundred years later.

Using a technique called x-ray diffraction, Franklin may have been the first to confirm

the helical structure of DNA.

She also figured out that the sugar-phosphate backbone existed on the outside of its structure.

So why is Rosalind Franklin not exactly a household name? Two reasons:

1. Unlike Watson & Crick, Franklin was happy to share data with her rivals. It was Franklin

who informed Watson & Crick that an earlier theory

of a triple-helix structure was not possible, and in doing so she indicated that DNA may

indeed be a double helix.

Later, her images confirming the helical structure of DNA were shown to Watson without her knowledge.

Her work was eventually published in Nature, but not until after two papers by Watson and

Crick had already appeared in which the duo only hinted at her contribution.

2. Even worse than that, the Nobel Prize Committee couldn't even consider her for the prize

that they awarded in 1962 because of how dead she was.

The really tragic thing is that it's totally possible that her scientific work may have

led to her early death of ovarian cancer at the age of 37.

At the time, the X-Ray diffraction technology that she was using to photograph DNA required

dangerous amounts of radiation exposure, and Franklin rarely took precautions to protect herself.

Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded posthumously. Many believe she would have shared Watson

and Crick's medal if she had been alive to receive it.

Now that we know the basics of DNA's structure, we need to understand how it copies itself,

because cells are constantly dividing, and that requires a complete copy of all of that

DNA information.

It turns out that our cells are extremely good at this -- our cells can create the