Question

What are the characteristics of DNA?

Answer 1

Hint: Many people believe that DNA was discovered in the 1950s by American biologist James Watson and English physicist Francis Crick. This is not the case in reality. Rather, Swiss chemist Friedrich Miescher discovered DNA in the late 1860s.

Complete answer:
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a molecule made up of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix and carry genetic instructions for all known organisms and viruses' development, function, growth, and reproduction.
Nucleic acids include DNA and ribonucleic acid (RNA). Nucleic acids are one of the four major types of macromolecules that are required for all known forms of life, alongside proteins, lipids, and complex carbohydrates (polysaccharides). As they are made up of smaller monomeric units called nucleotides, the two DNA strands are called polynucleotides. Each nucleotide is made up of a sugar called deoxyribose, a phosphate group, and one of four nitrogen-containing nucleobases (cytosine [C], guanine [G], adenine [A], or thymine [T]).
Covalent bonds (known as the phospho-diester linkage) between the sugar of one nucleotide and the phosphate of the next nucleotide link the nucleotides together in a chain, resulting in an alternating sugar-phosphate backbone. The nitrogenous bases of the two polynucleotide strands are linked together with hydrogen bonds according to base-pairing rules (A with T and C with G).
Thus, Adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine are the four nucleotides that makeup DNA. Each base also has three components: a nitrogen-containing base, a deoxyribose sugar, and a phosphate group.

Note:
DNA contains all of an organism's instructions for growth, survival, and reproduction. DNA sequences must be converted into messages that can be used to make proteins, which are the complex molecules that do the majority of the work in our bodies, to perform these functions.