Guanine

//ˈɡwɑː.niːn// noun

noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A substance first obtained from guano; it is a nucleic base and pairs with cytosine in DNA and RNA (by means of three hydrogen bonds).

    "Then he found them, the substances that made up the four-letter alphabet in whose language all life is written — adenine and cytosine, guanine and thymine."

  2. 2
    a purine base found in DNA and RNA; pairs with cytosine wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
aminohypoxanthineg

Example

More examples

"DNA is composed of four nucleotides: adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine."

Etymology

From guano + -ine. Guanine was named by the German chemist Julius Bodo Unger in 1846 who isolated it from guano.

Related phrases

hydrogen bond

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.