The internationally recognised abbreviation for the English term deoxyribonucleic acid is DNA. This is made up of "de-oxy" (without oxygen), "ribo" (sugar type ribose) and "nucleic acid" (nucleic acid). The term DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), which was previously used in German-speaking countries, is rarely used today to avoid confusion with the Domain Name System (also DNS) of the Internet.

The structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 by biologists James Watson (1928-2025) and Francis Crick (1916-2004). Together with Maurice Wilkins (1916-2004), they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962.
The first decoding of human DNA took place between 1990 and 2003 as part of the Human Genome Project (HGP). However, a complete sequence has only been available since 2022, after areas that were previously difficult to access, such as centromeres and telomeres, were decoded using new technologies.
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Markus J. Eser
Weinakademiker und Herausgeber „Der Weinkalender“