How does the structure of DNA enable the molecule to be easily transcribed and why is this important? PPT, Anoka-Hennepin School District,...

The building blocks of DNA are the nucleic acids - A, T, C, and G. These are made up of a sugar backbone, a base, and a phosphate group. The DNA is composed of two strands that form what is called the DNA double helix. Each strand is a sequence of the nucleic acids. The double helix is composed of two strands paired to each other. The pairing is such that the bases are paired...

The building blocks of DNA are the nucleic acids - A, T, C, and G. These are made up of a sugar backbone, a base, and a phosphate group. The DNA is composed of two strands that form what is called the DNA double helix. Each strand is a sequence of the nucleic acids. The double helix is composed of two strands paired to each other. The pairing is such that the bases are paired in a particular manner - i.e. A is always paired to T, and C is always paired to G. The strands are then complementary to each other. 

Transcription is the process by which DNA is 'converted' to RNA. (Note that it is actually not converted, but transcribed, and this process involves 'reading' of the DNA by a polymerase and synthesis of a corresponding RNA). The RNA produced after transcription is the messenger RNA (mRNA) and is used to synthesize proteins. The double helical structure of the DNA is important in that by virtue of complementary, one of the strands is the coding strand and the partner strand is the template. During transcription, DNA is unwound so that the template strand is accessible to the polymerase. The coding strand is the strand that will be 'converted' to the RNA and eventually be synthesized into a protein (that is, the 'blue print' is the coding strand). However, the polymerase binds to the template strand and generates RNA that is complementary to the template strand (and hence, identical to the coding strand, except for the difference in base - instead of a T there's a U for RNAs). This makes transcription easy as the bases are simply paired to the template strand in order to generate the mRNA associated with the coding strand, which is the blue print for a particular protein. This also makes the DNA structure important.