In this video, we're going to talk a little bit more about nucleotides. And so we already know from our last lesson video that nucleotides are the monomers of nucleic acids. But really just one single nucleotide monomer consists of 3 different components that we have numbered down below here in our text. And also notice that we have the 3 components color coordinated with these backgrounds, where the first component has a pink background, the second component has a blue background, and the third component has a yellow background. And these background colors correspond with the colors that you see down below in our image.
And so the very first component of a nucleotide monomer is a phosphate group, which recall from our previous lesson videos is just a functional group that looks like this down below, with a phosphorus atom in the middle. Now the second component of a nucleotide monomer is a pentose sugar, and all the pentose part means is that this sugar has a 5-membered ring. And so when we take a look at the blue component down below, notice that there is a ring, and the ring has a total of 5 members in it. And so that makes this a pentose sugar. And then the third and final component of a nucleotide monomer is a nitrogenous base.
And so it turns out that the nitrogenous base can vary, and there are 5 different types of nitrogenous bases. And we'll talk more about those 5 different types of nitrogenous bases in our next lesson video. But for now, taking a look down below, we can see the 3rd component is here in yellow, the nitrogenous base. So, in our last lesson video, we were abbreviating, nucleotides using symbols that look somewhat like this in the corner. But really, just one of these nucleotide monomers that we see here in the corner consists of 3 components, once again, the phosphate group here, the sugar component here, and the nitrogenous base up here.
And so you can think that this little nucleotide consists of these three components like what you see here. Now this leads us to different types of nucleotides. There are DNA nucleotides or deoxyribonucleic acid nucleotides. So DNA is the abbreviation for the molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid. And then there are also ribonucleic acid nucleotides or RNA nucleotides.
And so the DNA and RNA nucleotides, they use different sugars, amongst also, sometimes using different nitrogenous bases, which we'll talk more about as we move forward in our course. But if we take a look at our image down below, notice that we're comparing DNA nucleotides versus RNA nucleotides. The left half of our image over here is specifically for the DNA nucleotide, and the right half of our image over here is specifically for the RNA nucleotides. So notice that both nucleotides have 3 components that we talked about before, the pink component here, which is the phosphate group. This one also has a phosphate group, the RNA nucleotide.
They both also have a pentose sugar, and so, you can see that the blue part is here. And then they both also have nitrogenous bases. Now here specifically, we've said that, the nucleotides of DNA and RNA use different sugars. So we're going to focus in on the blue part here and over here. And notice that the RNA over here on the right, it uses a ribose sugar, whereas the DNA over here on the left uses a deoxyribose sugar.
And so the deoxy part here means one less oxygen. Oxy means oxygen and d means without. So, the deoxyribose sugar has one less oxygen in comparison to the ribose sugar over here. And so what this means is that the ribose sugar is going to have a hydroxyl group, an OH group at this position, and the deoxyribose over here is not going to have the extra oxygen. It's just going to have a hydrogen here.
And so the deoxyribose has one less oxygen comparing this position to this position over here. And so, we'll get to talk more about DNA and RNA as we move forward in our course, but, again, one of the biggest differences is that they use different sugars. DNA uses deoxyribose sugar, and RNA uses ribose sugar. So this here concludes our introduction to nucleotides, and we'll be able to get some practice applying these concepts as we move forward in our course. So I'll see you in our next video.