The purine structure consists of a pyrimidine ring (positions 1 to 6) fused to an imidazole ring (positions 7 to 9). Adenine and guanine, the two most common purines in DNA and RNA, share this core ...
Adenine was first discovered in 1885 by the German physiologist Albrecht Kossel. He isolated adenine from the pancreas of oxen and named it "adenine" derived from the Greek word "aden," meaning gland.
Elion was assigned a subgroup called purines. (Two of the four bases in DNA are purines -- adenine and guanine.) Hitchings reasoned that since bacteria, tumors, and certain parasites need large ...
the purine bases adenine and guanine, which are building blocks of DNA. They soon discovered, from observing the role of purines in nucleic acid metabolism, that bacterial cells require certain ...