Base pair
From EvoWiki
A base pair refers to two organic bases held together by weak hydrogen bonds across strands of DNA or RNA.
Purines (represented by adenine and guanine) always pair with pyrimidines (represented by cytosine, thymine and in the case of RNA, uracil). Consequently the configuration is A-T and G-C in DNA, and A-U in RNA. It is this bonding between base pairs that maintains DNAs characteristic double helix. This is known as Watson-Crick base pairing, after James Watson and Francis Crick.
The length of DNA strands are typically measured by their number of base pairs. For example, "gene X is 1000 base pairs long."
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This page is part of the EvoWiki encyclopedia of genetics and molecular biology. Topics: Genetics - Transmission genetics - Molecular genetics - Population genetics - Quantitative genetics - Molecular biology - Genomics |
