3.3 Sugars
Sugars are composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms joined together to form one or more rings. There are many different types of sugar whose names may be familiar to you (glucose, fructose, lactose). The table sugar you might add to your coffee is called sucrose. Sucrose is actually a combination of two simple sugars: glucose and fructose. The sugars ribose and deoxyribose are essential parts of nucleic acids (discussed next).
Content on this page was originally published in The Evolution and Biology of Sex by Sehoya Cotner & Deena Wassenberg and is reproduced here in compliance with the original CC-BY-NC 4.0 license.
