• Question: what is a base pair???

    Asked by to Heather, Ben, Dave, Ditte, Rebecca on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by , .
    • Photo: Rebecca Gladstone

      Rebecca Gladstone answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Our DNA is the instructions to our cells on how to make more cells. DNA is made up of four building blocks that we call A, T, G and C these are known as bases. DNA has two parts much like the two sides of a ladder, that are joined by the rungs, the rungs that join the two sides of the ladder are pairs of bases. But only certain bases go together. A joins to T and G joins with C so a base pair is talking about the pair of bases that join to the two sides of the DNA ladder. The sides of the ladder are called strands.
      Here’s my attempt at a little drawing of the DNA ladder…
      A |_| T
      C |_| G
      T |_| A
      G |_| C
      The base pairs in this diagram are A-T, C-G, T-A and G-C.
      The left strand can be read as ACTG and the right strand as TGAC. Notice that it doesn’t matter whether A is on the left or right strand, it always pairs with T, and G always pairs with C. Because we know what bases pair together we can work out what the right strand is if we know the bases in the left strand.

    • Photo: Ditte Hedegaard

      Ditte Hedegaard answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Hello

      Base pairs are the pairs of building-blocks, also called nucleotides, which makes up our genes. The nucleotides consist of a five-carbon sugar (ribose or deoxyribose), a phosphate group and a nitrogenous base and are named either guanine (G), cytosine (C), adenine (A) or thymine (T). Guanine will always pair up with cytosine and adenine will pair up with thymine to form the double stranded DNA complex, which kind of look like a ladder. You can see a picture of a DNA complex here
      http://www.ahrens.de/?attachment_id=11031

    • Photo: Ben White

      Ben White answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Following on from Rebecca’s great response, here is an image to help you visualize how this looks:

      You may also be interested to know that DNA bases don’t also match up with their corresponding nucelotides.
      Sometimes mis-matches can occur during DNA repair, and this may have implications in the formation and progression of things like cancer- they’re normally quickly corrected though!
      This is due to the modification of DNA bases, e.g. methylation, which control expression of the genes the sequenced of bases are associated with as part of our epigenome.
      Also, crazy things can happen like four DNA bases joining together to form a teramer.

    • Photo: Dave Baker

      Dave Baker answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Ok. The book of life has an alphabet that contains only 4 letters. A C G T, and all words are 3 letters long. That’s still a lot of combinations of words. The paragraphs are genes. Pair in base pair is just that the information is mirrored so that it can be split and copied. So the word have a secret copy that’s not so secret! ATG is TAC…

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