GC content

GC con·tent

the amount of guanine and cytosine in a polynucleic acid usually expressed in mole fraction (or percentage) of total bases; the melting temperature of such biopolymers varies with the GC content.

GC content

The percentage of nitrogenous bases on double-stranded DNA which is either guanine and cytosine, a datum of interest to molecular biologists as guanine and cytosine bind to each other with 3 hydrogen bonds (in contrast to adenine and thymine, which share 2 hydrogen bonds), and thus is a benchmark of molecular stability.