The building blocks Despite their importance in cellular function, nucleic acid structure is surprisingly simple. The structure of nucleotides. The sugar in this case is ribonucleic acid. The nucleotide structure can be broken down into 2 parts. The sugar-phosphate backbone and the base.
All nucleotides share the sugar-phosphate backbone.
Nucleotide polymers are formed by linking the monomer units together using an oxygen on the phosphate, and a hydroxyl group on the sugar. A, T, G and C are capable of being linked together to form a long chain. The base on each nucleotide is different, but they still show similarities. See Figure 1. If two strands of nucleic acid are adjacent to one another.