FORM A PHOSPHATE-ESTER LINK (TO CARBON THREE)
Based on "Tie a Yellow Ribbon (Round the Old Oak Tree)"
Original
Words and Music by Irwin Levine and L Russell Brown
One strand runs 5 prime to 3 prime,
When the nucleotides join up in a line,
Each one’s got a pentose sugar, with a base on carbon one,
And a phosphate group on five joins the next one on
At the third carbon:
Form a phosphate-ester link to carbon three
Of the ribose sugar (that’s deoxy-);
When DNA polymerase joins O to P,
The nucleotides will polymerise,
DNA will be
A double strand that’s anti-parallel, coiled helically.
The other strand’s upside-down,
So the bases face the other way around:
The base pairs join by H-bonds - purine with pyrimidine -
So guanine forms three with… cytosine, and then thymine
Forms two with adenine;
Form a phosphate-ester link to carbon three
Of the ribose sugar (that’s deoxy-);
When DNA polymerase joins O to P,
The nucleotides will polymerise,
DNA will be
A double strand that’s anti-parallel, coiled helically.
Form a phosphate-ester link to carbon three
Of the ribose sugar (that’s deoxy-),
And it’s deoxyribosenucleic acid that you’ll see:
A double strand that’s anti-parallel, coiled helically!
© Aimee Hartnell, April 2000