Chapter 16

Molecular Basis of Inheritance

Noteworthy Points of the Chapter
1. Length of DNA, a polymerofdeoxyribonucleotides is usually defined as number of nucleotides or basepairs.
2. A bacteriophage, x174 has 5386 nucleotides, bacteriophage lambda has 48502 bp, Escherichia coli has
4.6 x10 bp and haploid content of human DNA is 3.3 * 10 bp.

3 A nucleotide contains a nitrogenous base, a sugar and a phosphate group.

4. Nitrogenous base are purines (A and G) and pyrimidines (T or U and C).

5. A nitrogenous base is linked to the pentose sugarthrough N-glycosidic linkage to form a nucleoside.

6. In a nucleotide, a phosphate group is linked to 5-OH of a nucleoside through phosphoesterlinkage

7. The backbone of polynucleotide chain is formed by sugar and phosphate. While bases are flanked inside.

8. 5-methyl uracil is another chemical name for thymine. RNA contains uracil in place of thymine.

9 Watson and Crick proposed double helix model of DNA based on the X-ray diffraction data produced by
Wilkins and Franklin.

10. Adenine forms 2 hydrogen bonds with Thymine and Guanine forms 3 hydrogen bonds with cytosine.

11. The two chains of DNA are coiled in a right handed fashion and they run in antiparallel manner. The pitch of
helix is 3.4 nm and there are roughly 10 bp in each turn.

12. Francis Crick proposed the central dogma, which states that genetic information flows from DNA RNA
protein.
13. In prokaryotes, DNA being negatively charged is held with some positively charged proteins in a region termed
as nucleoid.

14. In eukaryotes, DNA is held with set of positively charged, basic proteins caled histones.They are organised to
form a unit of eight molecules called histone octamer.

15. The DNA is wrapped around histone octamer to form structure called nucleosome. It contains approx 200 bp of
DNA helix.

16. Nucleosomes constitute the repeating unit of a structure in nucleus called chromatin. They are seen as

beads-on-string structure when viewed under electron microscope.

h e chromatin fibres, coiled and condensed at metaphase stage of cell division to form chromosome.
Ihe packaging of chromatin at higher level requires proteins called non-histone chromosomal (NHC) proteins.

akash Educational Services Limited-Regd. Office:Aakash Tower, 8, Pusa Road, New Delhi-110005 Ph. 011-47623456