Adenine and my Organic UFO

Since I'm still working on my Organic Chemistry Quilt, I decided that this will be my April finish goal (since I didn't finish it in March) for "A Lovely Year of Finishes" link up.  I'm also linking up with WIP Wed, since it is still a WIP ;-).  Below is the half-quilted quilt.

I also decided that it'd be fun to highlight my organic chemicals one by one while we all wait for this quilt to get finished!

Organic Chemistry was one of my most difficult classes in college.  It was required for a biology degree, and I'm sure glad it was, as I used a lot of it in the medical lab.  Working in the Chemistry and Special Chemistry departments in the lab gave me much better knowledge and appreciation of this science.  Organic Chemistry is, after all the chemistry of life.

For my quilt, I picked only chemicals that have these fun little hexagonal and pentagonal rings.  Each side of the pentagon or hexagon is a chemical bond.  Here's what it looks like on paper:

Adenine is one of the "nucleotides", or essential building blocks of DNA and RNA.  They're so vital to living things that I had to include them on my quilt.  There are 4 of these that make up DNA (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine), and 4 that make up RNA (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Uracil).  These 4 DNA bases combine with a "sugar phosphate backbone" in pairs that make up the classic DNA double helix.  These long chains are then coiled up into chromosomes that are found in the nucleus of every living cell.  Pretty amazing!

Adenine is also a major component of ATP, or Adenosine Triphosphate, which is a major energy-releasing compound found in all cells. It is also used in other metabolic cellular  processes.

So that's our Organic Chemistry trivia tidbit for the day!

I'll try to do a write up on each of my quilt molecules in the days to come.

Meanwhile, if anyone can tell me how to get that awful smudge out of my digital camera, I'd really appreciate it.  The lens is clean, so I fear it's inside the camera somewhere.