The Structure of DNA Taking Into Account the Higher Dimension of Its Components

Introduction

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), as a chemical substance, it was isolated by Johann Friedrich Micher in 1869 from the remains of cells contained in the pus. He singled out a substance that includes nitrogen and phosphorus. When Misher determined that this substance has acid properties, the substance was called nucleic acid (Dahm, 2005). Gradually it was proved that it was DNA, and not proteins, as previously thought, and which is the carrier of genetic information. One of the first decisive proofs was the experiments of Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and McLean McCarthy (1944) on the transformation of bacteria.

The structure of the double helix DNA it was proposed by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953 on the base of the X-ray structural data obtained by Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin and the “Chargaff rules” according to which in each DNA molecule the strict relationships connecting the quantity of nitrogenous bases of different (Watson, & Crick, 1953a, b). For outstanding contributions to this discovery, Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a biopolymer, the monomer of which is the nucleotide (Albert, et al., 2002; Butler, 2005). Each nucleotide consists of a phosphoric acid residue attached to sugar deoxyribose, to which one of the four nitrogen bases is attached also. The bases that make up the nucleotides are divided into two groups: purines (adenine [A] and guanine [G]) and pyrimidines (cytosine [C] and thymine [T]) are formed by combined five - and six - membered heterocycles.

They managed to show that the DNA isolated from the pneumococci corresponds to the so-called transformation (the acquisition of pathogenic properties by a harmless culture as result of the addition of dead pathogenic bacteria to it). The experiment of American scientists Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase (Hershey - Chase experiment, 1952) with radioactively labeled proteins and bacteriophage DNA showed that only the phage nucleic acid is transmitted to the infected cell, and the new generation of phage contains the same proteins and nucleic acid, as the initial phage (Hershey & Chase, 1952). Deciphering the structure of DNA (1953) has become one of the turning points in the history of biology.

In 1986, Frank-Kamenetskiy in Moscow showed how a double-stranded DNA folds into a so-called H - shape, composed not of two but three strands of DNA (Frank – Kamenetskiy, 1986, 1988). Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a biopolymer, the monomer of which is the nucleotide (Albert et al., 2002; Butler, 2005).