As a biology pre-health student, a great deal of the material in this course applies to my other coursework and is a building block for the rest of my academic journey. One topic that sticks out in my mind, is the chemical interactions that give our DNA its structure and functionality. Last semester I took Organic Chemistry II, and I learned about complex chemical reactions and the importance of functional groups. So, when we started diving into nucleotides, I was very excited to actually comprehend how the different functional groups and bonding patterns make our DNA such a powerful structure. More specifically, how the five carbon sugars differ with deoxyribose having a single hydroxyl group while ribose has two hydroxyl groups. And how the nitrogenous bases differ in width and become a nucleotide when joined by a phosphate group on the 5’C of the nucleoside. These are then joined with adjacent nucleotide sequences via phosphodiester bonds. The polarity of the DNA strand is defined by these phosphodiester bonds, because of the phosphate group on the 5’C and the orientation of the hydroxyl group on the 3’C on the nucleotides. I thought it was fascinating to learn more about the complexity of DNA structure because it is something that has been brought up in all my previous biology courses, but never in so much detail where I could attribute certain characteristics to chemical processes that now make sense to me. As a visual leaner I enjoyed the SmartBio animations, and I believe they helped me fully visualize how all these interacting pieces fit together.