Chapter 10 Flashcards
What are the building blocks of DNA
nucleotides
How many nitrogenous bases are there?
four
What are the four nitrogenous bases?
adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine.
What are nucleotides composed of?
a nitrogenous base, deoxyribose (type of sugar), and a phosphate group.
where is the genetic information of an organism stored?
in dna, in the form of genes.
what are the two key processes for effective DNA function?
information in DNA must be copied with no errors every time a cell divides, and the information in the DNA must be correctly expressed.
Copying and reading the information stored in DNA relies on what?
it relies on base pairing between two nucleic acid polymer strands.
what is DNA polymerase?
an enzyme that attaches many pieces of DNA
what does a ligase do?
it helps join nucleotides as they are added to the replicating DNA.
what does a helicase do?
it helps unwind DNA helices.
what is proofreading?
the DNA polymerase reads the newly added base before adding the next one so a correction can be made.
