I was watching an episode of Monk, and one of the characters, when asked what DNA stands for, says “Deoxyribonucleic Acid.”
I corrected him, saying “Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.” My wife said, “Really? I’ve always said it the way he did on the TV.”
Anyway, after a bunch of searching, it seems that both terms are used quite frequently, and i haven’t found an explanation. Is this just a question of different usage? I assume they mean exactly the same thing, in terms of chemical composition?
One possibility that struck me was that this could be another UK/US thing. I grew up in Australia (where our usage more closely mirrors that of the UK), and i was always taught Deoxyribose.
I notice that Watson and Crick’s original paper, published in Nature, was titled “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.”
So, you scientific types: Which spelling is used more frequently within the scientific community? Does it vary by journal, or by country? Is it considered at all important among scientists?
I have a degree in microbiology, I’ve been working in a clinical molecular laboratory for six years, and I’m heading off this fall to start a PhD in molecular biology. I’ve never in my life heard anyone say “Deoxyribose nucleic acid”. Granted, 99% of the time, it’s just “DNA”, but still, when I’ve heard it fully spelled out, it’s always been “deoxyribonucleic acid”. It’s all one long compound word, modifying “acid”. I guess you could say it the other way and not be incorrect, but to my ears it sounds wrong and vaguely old fashioned or extremely formal.
I should also add that I also listen to a LOT of British radio, including a fair amount of science programming, and I’ve never heard them say it either.
I have a BSc in laboratory science and have taken some graduate molecular biology classes and also have never heard or read ‘deoxyribose nucleic’ acid. I even had a British prof for one class and I don’t believe I ever heard him say it that way.
PhD in Molecular Biology, and I’ve always seen it as “deoxyribonucleic acid”, except in the early papers (50s and 60s). I always figured that originally when they were working with these things, they referred to them as their individual parts (the ribose, and the nucleotides) because that’s how they saw them, and over time it just got slurred together. Maybe there’s some actual chemistry to it though.
I understand that this might be the most common term; certainly, the small sample size in this thread so far suggests that your term is far more common than the one i was taught. And online searches also find more instances of your term.
But it seems to me, from the evidence i’ve found online, that asserting this to be the [only] correct term, as you seem to be doing, is something of a stretch.
After all, as i said in the OP, Watson and Crick’s famous paper describing the double helix called it Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. Here’s a copy of the article
Were Watson and Crick incorrect?
I decided to check the Oxford English Dictionary, which says:
And, on preview, Bob55’s explanation makes pretty good sense. It never occurred to me to try and investigate whether it was a case of the name changing over time; i assumed the difference was regional, but it could be temporal.
Another PhD in Biochemistry here - research project on DNA repair, done in the early 80s but been out of the field ever since. I don’t recall ever hearing “Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid”.
My postdoctoral research was in alternative forms of DNA structure (Z-DNA specifically), so I have a particular interest in DNA from both a structural and genetic standpoint. So, your question and response inspired me- I did a Pubmed literature search using deoxyribose nucleic acid as a search string.
Surprisingly- and I mean surprisingly since I have publications in the journal Nucleic Acid Research- there are 21st century usages of this term. There are instances from Europe, Middle East and US researchers. One aspect they have in common is that the papers all seem to be structural papers (like Watson and Crick’s were) so the usage may be a function of discipline- molecular biologists, geneticists and the like use the deoxyribonucleic acid form while structural biologists use the deoxyribose nucleic acid. My search was not exhaustive, so I’m not making any clams with certainty, but a quick paper chase seems to bear this out.
Interesting. You have given me something new to think about and discuss in my molecular genetics class in the fall. cool!
Thanks for the responses, everyone, and thanks to IvoryTowerDenizen for the research. Your results, and your disciplinary suggestion, are very interesting.
I just did a bit more research of my own. As you will recall from the OP, i grew up in Australia. Searching Google for “deoxyribose nucleic acid,” and limiting the search to .au domains, i got quite a lot of results, especially from universities and other educational institutions. There were also quite a few papers on the website of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), which is Australia’s national scientific agency.
I also found this, which is a website called HSC Online. HSC is the Higher School Certificate, the statewide exam for high school seniors in Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales. So, it seems that the term i was taught in school in the 1980s is still being taught to Australian school students.
If IvoryTowerDenizen’s theory is right, Australia seems to be dominated by structural biologists. Either that, or it’s just behind the times.
Ingeniero Químico Superior (Chem Eng, 5 years plus thesis), including biochemistry which is at the 5xx level in the US (serious, same textbook), followed by an MS in chemistry, and it’s always been Deoxyribonucleic Acid (and Ribonucleic Acid).
(Deoxy)ribose is a component of it, the sugar that’s part of its backbone. These acids are long strands of a repeatable unit, from which the nucleotids “hang”. The sugar is part of the repeatable unit.
Though, strikingly, they switched to “Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid” for their sequel paper, just a month later. Nor can this be explained by a journal style, since that was also published in Nature. They seem to have consistently kept to this version in their later papers.
(FWIW, Franklin and Gosling used “Sodium deoxyribose nucleate” in their figure caption, but otherwise stuck to talking about “Sodium Thymonucleate”. In the third of the famous trio of papers, Wilkins, Stokes and Wilson used “Deoxypentose Nucleic Acid” in their title.)
BS in Microbiology and molecular genetics and 9 years experience in an academic environment here, and I’ve never heard it as anything other than deoxyribonucleic acid either.
According to The Dictionary of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, 3ed, desoxy- is “a prefix equivalent to ‘deoxy-’”
Geneticist here. I don’t recall anyone actually saying it during the last 8 years. Plus, when I’m trying to trim down a paper to get it published I sure as hell wouldn’t write it out.
Mulling the matter over, I’ll conjecture that it may be a fluke of the writing process. Crick is usually thought to have drafted the first paper, with Watson amending. Since Watson initially dragged his heels about committing to the second paper, it’s usually assumed that Crick, as the one pushing for it, did most of the writing on it. But Matt “Northern Rock” Ridley points out in his recent short bio of Crick that the only surviving draft of it is in Watson’s handwriting, with amendments in Crick’s. (It’s known that the ordering of their names on the papers was being decided with a coin, so that doesn’t help.)
“Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” is 1953 Crick, “Deoxyribonucleic Acid” Watson?
