Alright. So, the first group of monosaccharide derivatives that we're going to talk about are the sugar phosphates. And so as you may have already guessed, sugar phosphates are just carbohydrates that are covalently attached to phosphate groups. As we move forward through our course, sugar phosphates are going to make up part of the structure of nucleotides. Of course, nucleotides make up the structure of nucleic acids such as DNA. Notice below we're showing you a DNA molecule, and we're zooming in on this region of the DNA molecule here. You can see that we have these carbohydrates or these sugars, and notice that the sugars are covalently attached to phosphate groups. You can see that we have another sugar here that is also covalently attached to another phosphate group. It's true that the structure of DNA does include sugar phosphates. Later in our course, we'll talk more details about the exact structure of DNA, but for now, we're focusing just on sugar phosphates.

You'll also note that later in our course when we're talking about carbohydrate metabolism, you'll find that sugar phosphates are going to be an important intermediate in the pathways of both carbohydrate metabolism, and carbohydrate catabolism; breaking things down and building things up. Again, we'll talk more about this later in our course. If you take a look at this box over here, what you'll notice is that we've got this D-glucose molecule here, which is a carbohydrate that we can metabolize. Notice that through phosphorylation, we can take the D-glucose molecule and get a D-glucose 6 - phosphate molecule. Notice that the D-glucose molecule is now covalently attached to this phosphate group here. We'll see many different intermediates in the pathways of carbohydrate metabolism and catabolism that include these sugar phosphates. This sugar phosphate can continue through carbohydrate metabolism through the glycolysis pathway here. But again, we'll talk a lot more about carbohydrate metabolism later in our course, and right now, we're just focusing on sugar phosphates. They make up part of the structure of DNA, and they're going to be important intermediates and carbohydrate metabolism and catabolism.

That concludes our introduction to sugar phosphates. In our next video, we'll be able to talk about the next group of sugar derivatives, which are the sugar alcohols. So I'll see you guys there.