Why is nucleic acid a polymer?

1 Answer
Joëlle
Sep 5, 2016

Because it consists of monomer building blocks.

Explanation:

A polymer is a large molecule that is built up from multiple smaller building blocks in a repetitive manner.

The building blocks of the nucleic acids DNA and RNA are nucleotides (see image). The nucleotides have a phosphate group, a sugar group and a nitrogenous base (adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine or uracil).

http://watson-int.com/carbohydrate-and-nucleotide/

Many of these building blocks bound together for the nucleic acid i.e. the polymer:

http://rosalind.info/problems/dna/

This is an example of a double-stranded nucleic acid = DNA. It can also be a single strand = RNA. Both DNA and RNA are polymers.

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