From the very early stages of structural studies of DNA by X-ray diffraction and biochemical means, molecular models such as the Watson-Crick nucleic acid double helix model were successfully employed to solve the puzzle of DNA structure, and also find how the latter relates to its key functions in living cells. The first high quality X-ray diffraction patterns
of A-DNA were reported by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling in 1953. Rosalind Franklin made the critical observation that DNA exists in two distinct forms, A and B, and produced the sharpest pictures of both through X-ray diffraction technique. The first calculations of the Fourier transform of an atomic helix were reported one year earlier by Cochran, Crick and Vand, and were followed in 1953 by the computation of the Fourier transform of a coiled-coil by Crick.
Structural information is generated from X-ray diffraction studies of oriented DNA fibers with the help of molecular models of DNA that are combined with crystallographic and mathematical analysis of the X-ray patterns.
The first reports of a double helix molecular model of B-DNA structure were made by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. That same year, Maurice F. Wilkins,
A. Stokes and H.R. Wilson, reported the first X-ray patterns
of in vivo B-DNA in partially oriented salmon sperm heads.
The development of the first correct double helix molecular model of DNA by Crick and Watson may not have been possible without the biochemical evidence for the nucleotide base-pairing ([A---T]; [C---G]), or Chargaffs rules. Although such initial studies of DNA structures with the help of molecular models were essentially static, their consequences for explaining the in vivo functions of DNA were significant in the areas of protein biosynthesis and the quasi-universality of the genetic code. Epigenetic transformation studies of DNA in vivo' were however much slower to develop despite their importance for embryology, morphogenesis and cancer research. Such chemical dynamics and biochemical reactions of DNA are much more complex than the molecular dynamics of DNA physical interactions with water, ions and proteins/enzymes in living cells.