phosphodiester bond
Sign in to save–O– linkage between phosphoric acid and two other compounds
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Encyclopedic overview
Diagram of phosphodiester bonds ( PO3−4) between three nucleotides. The 5' end has a 5' carbon attached to a phosphate, and the other end, the 3' end, has a 3' carbon attached to a hydroxyl group.
In chemistry, a phosphodiester bond occurs when exactly two of the hydroxyl groups (−OH) in phosphoric acid react with hydroxyl groups on other molecules to form two ester bonds. The "bond" involves this linkage C−O−PO−2O−C. Discussion of phosphodiesters is dominated by their prevalence in DNA and RNA, but phosphodiesters occur in other biomolecules, e.g. acyl carrier proteins, phospholipids and the cyclic forms of GMP and AMP (cGMP and cAMP).
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “phosphodiester bond” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.