What is DNA?

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is the hereditary material in humans and

almost all other organisms. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same
DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA),
but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is
called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).

The information in DNA is stored as a code made up of four chemical bases:

adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). Human DNA consists
of about 3 billion bases, and more than 99 percent of those bases are the
same in all people. The order, or sequence, of these bases determines the
information available for building and maintaining an organism, similar to the
way in which letters of the alphabet appear in a certain order to form words
and sentences.
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/basics/dna

The two strands of DNA run in opposite directions to each other and are thus antiparallel.
Attached to each sugar is one of four types of nucleobases (informally, bases). It is
the sequence of these four nucleobases along the backbone that encodes biological
information. RNA strands are created using DNA strands as a template in a process
called transcription. Under the genetic code, these RNA strands are translated to specify
the sequence of amino acids within proteins in a process called translation.
Within eukaryotic cells DNA is organized into long structures called chromosomes.
During cell division these chromosomes are duplicated in the process of DNA replication,
providing each cell its own complete set of chromosomes. Eukaryotic
organisms (animals, plants, fungi and protists) store most of their DNA inside the cell
nucleus and some of their DNA in organelles, such as mitochondria or chloroplasts.[4] In
contrast prokaryotes(bacteria and archaea) store their DNA only in the cytoplasm. Within
the eukaryotic chromosomes, chromatin proteins such as histones compact and organize
DNA. These compact structures guide the interactions between DNA and other proteins,
helping control which parts of the DNA are transcribed.
DNA was first isolated by Friedrich Miescher in 1869. Its molecular structure was first
identified by James Watson and Francis Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory within
the University of Cambridge in 1953, whose model-building efforts were guided by X-ray
diffraction data acquired by Raymond Gosling, who was a post-graduate student
of Rosalind Franklin. DNA is used by researchers as a molecular tool to explore physical
laws and theories, such as the ergodic theorem and the theory of elasticity. The unique
material properties of DNA have made it an attractive molecule for material scientists and
engineers interested in micro- and nano-fabrication. Among notable advances in this field
are DNA origami and DNA-based hybrid materials.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA