1 Atomic St ructures of the M olecular Components in DNA and RNA based on Bond L engths as Sums of Atomic Radii Raji Heyrovská (Institute of Biophysics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic) E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract The author’s interpretation in recent years of bond lengths as sums of the relevant atomic/ionic radii has been extended here to the bonds in the skeletal structures of adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine, uracil, ribose, deoxyribose and phosphoric acid. On examining the bond length data in the literature, it has been found that the averages of the bond lengths are close to the sums of the corresponding atomic covalent radii of carbon (tetravalent), nitrogen (trivalent), oxygen (divalent), hydrogen (monovalent) and phosphorus (pentavalent). Thus, the conventional molecular structures have been resolved here (for the first time) into probable atomic structures. 1. Introduction The interpretation of the bond lengths in the molecules constituting DNA and RNA have been of interest ever since the discovery [1] of the molecular structure of nucleic acids. This work was motivated by the earlier findings [2a,b] that the inter-atomic distance between any two atoms or ions is, in general, the sum of the radii of the atoms (and or ions) constituting the chemical bond, whether the bond is partially or fully ionic or covalent. It 2 was shown in [3] that the lengths of the hydrogen bonds in the Watson- Crick [1] base pairs (A, T and C, G) of nucleic acids as well as in many other inorganic and biochemical compounds are sums of the ionic or covalent radii of the hydrogen donor and acceptor atoms or ions and of the transient proton involved in the hydrogen bonding.