Hi! I know that adenine is in ATP, and that mainly if not only it is used as energy carrier, but all bases should be roughly in the same proportions in DNA and RNA-s, so is there more adenine in cell? And side question, do bases just hang out in cytoplasm or wherever, or are they produced when needed? Sorry if similar question was asked.
In: Biology
As far as distribution is concerned though, here on the wiki page for [Chagraff’s rules](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chargaff%27s_rules) which is related to nucleotide distribution and stuff, you get percentage frequencies of the different nucleotide bases. I may be interpreting this incorrectly, but you’d expect the two pairs of bases to be relatively even, since they occur in pairs. A/T and G/C…
But apparently that’s not the case? The listing for humans shows they percentages are close, but not exactly the same so there must be something I don’t understand in regards to their ratios being different.
Edit: I don’t know how to read.
From [this abstract](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7877593/). Of course, being just an abstract isn’t great, but it has been cited by 589 other papers, which is usually a good sign it knows what it’s on about.
ATP has an average concentration in a mammalian cell of 3152mM, GTP 468mM, UTP 567mM and CTP 278mM. So, way more ATP than the other nucleoside-triphosphates (NTPs), which should make sense given its role as the main unit of energy in a cell. GTP in particular also plays a vital role in cell signalling, being used by things you may have heard of called G-proteins. These triphosphates are what RNA synthesis mechanisms use to build RNA strands, too, so these numbers represent both the amounts needed for their own roles in energy movement and signalling and the amounts needed for RNA synthesis. Of course, with standard deviations as large as those, it’s clear there’s a *lot* of variation depending on what specific kinds of cells require.
Deoxynucleoside-triphosphates (dNTPs) are what are used to build DNA, which should explain why their concentrations are much lower than those of the ribose-based NTPs – cells mostly only need the deoxy versions during DNA replication, which happens a lot less than RNA synthesis, energy consumption/production and cell signalling.
So basically – yes, you are right. Adenine is much more common in cells than the other bases, although because all of them have various roles outside nucleic acids, the difference isn’t entirely from the use of ATP as an energy transporter. Also yes they do kinda just hang out in the cytoplasm, although more do need to be produced regularly, particularly leading up to and after cell division where half the cell goes rogue. Also, they hang around mostly in their triphosphate forms, with only a few di- or mono-phosphates.
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