In this video, we're going to begin our lesson on nucleic acids. Nucleic acids, we know, are one of the major classes of biomolecule polymers, and it turns out that nucleic acids can have a variety of different types of functions. However, in our biology course, we're going to focus on the primary function of nucleic acids, which is really to store and encode genetic information or information that can be passed down from one generation to the next generation of life. An example of a nucleic acid is, of course, DNA. We'll get to talk more about DNA as we move forward in our course. But another example of a nucleic acid is also RNA. Once again, we'll get to talk more about DNA and RNA as we move forward in our class.
The monomers or the building blocks that are used to build nucleic acid polymers are referred to as nucleotides. You can see that there's a resemblance between nucleic acids and nucleotides just by looking at the first few letters here, the "nucle" prefix, and so that can be helpful to keep in mind. Nucleic acid polymers, similar to proteins, have directionality in their chain, meaning that one end of the chain will be chemically different than the other end of the chain. When it comes to nucleic acid polymers, the directionality is indicated with a 5' end and a 3' end. Moving forward in our course, we'll get to talk more about the directionality and the difference between the 5' and 3' ends. But for now, we just need to know that there is directionality, and it's indicated with a 5' and 3' end.
Let's take a look at our example down below at the formation of nucleic acids from nucleotide monomers. Notice on the far left, we have these separate individual building blocks or monomers of nucleotides. So, we can label these as nucleotide monomers. Notice that they are separate and individual pieces here. But if we wanted to combine these separate pieces, these separate nucleotides and link them together into a chain like what we see over here on the right, then we're building ourselves a nucleic acid polymer, for example, a DNA polymer. It's also important to note that nucleic acid polymers, they have directionality, which means one end of the chain is going to be chemically different than the other end of the chain. As mentioned above, we refer to this directionality as the 5' and the 3' ends. We can put the 5' end over here and the 3' end over there. Once again, we'll get to talk more about the 5' and 3' ends and exactly what they're referring to as we move forward in our course.
But for now, this here concludes our introduction to nucleic acids, and we'll get to talk more about them as we move forward. So, I'll see you all in our next video.