General ---------Biology----------------------------------------------------- ------------------Online--------------------------------------- Ch. 5 Macromolecules: carbohydrates, fats, proteins, nucleic acids

Nucleic acids are polymers.  They are made up monomers called nucleotides (A,T,G,C).  Each monomer has three parts.  Look at the following figure and list the three parts of a monomer and their color in the figure.

_________________, _________________, _______________. 

The nucleic acid is a chain of nucleotide monomers.  Each DNA chain (containing your genes) is thousands to hundreds of thousands of nucleotides long.  RNA chains are hundreds of nucleotides long.

How many nucleotides in the Figure above? _____
How many condensation reactions were required to build it? ____

Look at Figure 5.28 in your text and describe why RNA molecules are shorter than DNA molecules (one sentence).  ______________________________________________

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