September 3, 2011 – 3:00 am
Adenine pathways: UV protection racket - A collaboration between teams in Germany and the US has shown that one of the building blocks of the nucleic acids DNA and RNA, adenine, has a previously unrecognised variable range of ionization energies along its reaction pathways. The finding could improve our understanding of experimental data regarding how adenine survives exposure to ultraviolet light, showing that the processes might be more complicated than previously thought. However, it also has potentially far-reaching implications for spectroscopic measurements of other heterocyclic compounds.
September 2, 2011 – 9:00 am
Physicists uncover new data on adenine, a crucial building block of life - A University of Georgia physicist and a collaborator in Germany have shown that one of these building blocks of DNA and RNA, adenine, has an unexpectedly variable range of ionization energies along its reaction pathways. This means that understanding experimental data on how adenine survives exposure to UV light is much more complicated than previously thought. It also has far-reaching implications for spectroscopic measurements of heterocyclic compounds-those with atoms of at least two different elements in their rings.
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