Which sugar is part of DNA's backbone?

Which sugar is part of DNA's backbone? Deoxyribose is the five-carbon sugar built into DNA's sugar-phosphate backbone.

More precisely, DNA contains 2-deoxyribose, a modified form of the sugar ribose. The “deoxy” name refers to the loss of an oxygen-containing hydroxyl group at the 2′ carbon. That small chemical difference helps distinguish DNA from RNA, whose backbone sugar is ribose.

Each DNA nucleotide contains three components: deoxyribose, a phosphate group, and one nitrogenous base—adenine, thymine, cytosine, or guanine. Deoxyribose connects the phosphate groups, while its 1′ carbon attaches to a base. The bases project inward in the double helix and carry the genetic sequence.

A common mix-up is answering “ribose,” because ribose is the sugar in RNA. Another is naming a base such as adenine or thymine; bases encode information but are not the backbone sugar. Deoxyribose was identified in DNA-related material by Phoebus Levene in 1929.