(noun. /rye-bO-new-clay-Ick ah-sED/)
by Quinn Eberhard
What does it mean?
A core chemical of living organisms, similar in chemical properties to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), but with an additional 3’ hydroxyl group on the sugar. RNA has a wide range of roles in the cell, including making new proteins, altering how genes are expressed, and much more.
How do I use it in a sentence?
“A strand of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) can be transcribed into ribonucleic acid (RNA) by an RNA polymerase.”
The image depicts a single strand of RNA with a phosphate backbone depicted in black and the four RNA bases depicted in green, blue, orange, and magenta attached perpendicularly to the black line. The chemical structure of the phosphate backbone and how it connects to a ribose sugar and base is shown in the middle of the figure with the negatively charged phosphate backbone, ribose sugar, and the 3’ hydroxyl groups highlighted and labeled with a highlighted legend to the right of the structure. Below the RNA strand are the chemical structures of four RNA bases: uracil (in green), cytosine (in blue), guanine (in orange), and adenine (in magenta). The first letter of each RNA bases’ name is underlined to indicate the single letter that codes for each base in an RNA sequence. An example sequence is shown at the top with the letters ‘CGUAGCU’ to match the order of the colors on the RNA strand diagram, from top to bottom. Image is the author’s own work.
Etymology
“Ribo-” comes from the German word ribose describing the sugar structure in the middle of a single nucleic acid. “-nucleic” stems from the German word for nuklein as the nucleus of the cell is where these chemicals were first discovered. “Acid” comes from the Latin word acidus, which indicates the chemical property of easily donating protons, which the phosphate backbone exhibits.
Related terms
Transcript
Transcriptome
Fields of study in which this word is commonly used
Biology
Genetics
Genomics
Biochemistry
