urasiiliksi

Urasiiliksi is the Finnish term used to denote uracil, one of the pyrimidine nucleobases essential for RNA. Uracil is found in RNA as a canonical base, pairing with adenine through two hydrogen bonds; in DNA, thymine serves that role instead, and uracil is typically absent. Chemically, uracil is a small, planar heterocycle with the formula C4H4N2O2 and two carbonyl groups at the 2 and 4 positions. The presence of uracil in RNA allows cellular mechanisms to distinguish RNA from DNA and to recognize RNA-based genetic information.

In biology, uracil is incorporated into RNA during transcription by RNA polymerases using UTP as the substrate. It is involved in coding, processing, and translation of genetic information, including tRNA, rRNA, and mRNA. Uracil is also produced biologically via de novo pyrimidine biosynthesis and can be salvaged from uridine or uracil itself. Cytosine deamination creates uracil, a lesion that cells repair using uracil-DNA glycosylase, highlighting uracil’s role in genome maintenance.

In biotechnology and research, uracil-containing nucleotides (for example dUTP) are used in PCR and sequencing workflows to enable selective degradation of DNA or to prevent carryover contamination.

This article uses urasiiliksi as the translative form to refer to uracil within Finnish scientific literature; otherwise the base is universally known as uracil in RNA biology.