Drawing simple diagrams of the structure of single nucleotides of DNA and RNA

• Simple shapes?can be used to draw the?main building blocks of nucleotides?and the DNA double helix
  • Advanced drawing skills are not required!
• Pentagons?can represent?pentose sugars
• Circles?can represent?phosphates
  • Often shown as a circle with the letter P inside: ?
• Rectangles?can represent?bases
• Covalent bonds?can be shown with?solid lines
• Hydrogen bonds?can be shown with?dashed lines
  • Or with complementary shapes that fit together (see diagrams)

Simple shapes can be used to represent parts of nucleotide molecules

Two nucleotides shown bonded together covalently within a strand

When drawing the base pairing, the opposite strand should be antiparallel to the first.?The presence of hydrogen bonding is shown, but the numbers/lengths of bonds is not required

An alternative way to draw a DNA strand is to use complementary shapes for the bases