History of molecular biology Crick and Watson built physical models using metal rods and balls, in which they incorporated the known chemical structures of the nucleotides, as well as the known position of the linkages joining one nucleotide to the next along the polymer. At King's College Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin examined X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA fibers. Of the three groups, only the London group was able to produce good quality diffraction patterns and thus produce sufficient quantitative data about the structure. In 1948 Pauling discovered that many proteins included helical (see alpha helix) shapes. Pauling had deduced this structure from X-ray
Non-helical models of DNA structure The SBS structure was hypothetical, and was not based primarily upon physical evidence. It was created to provide a theoretical solution to the angular momentum problem in DNA replication, which Rodley believed to be otherwise unsolvable. The SBS structure is a modification of the original Watson-Crick structure where, instead of one fully right-handed helical twist every 10 base pairs, there is only a "half"-twist of 5 base pairs’ length, followed immediately by a half-twist in the "opposite" direction (that is, a left-handed half-twist, also of 5 base pairs’ length). This alternating pattern of right- and left-handed half-twists is repeated throughout