History of genetics code for specific proteins, leading to the "one gene, one enzyme" hypothesis. Oswald Avery, Colin Munro MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty showed in 1944 that DNA holds the gene's information. In 1952, Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling produced a strikingly clear x-ray diffraction pattern indicating a helical form, and in 1953, James D. Watson and Francis Crick demonstrated the molecular structure of DNA. Together, these discoveries established the central dogma of molecular biology, which states that proteins are translated from RNA which is transcribed by DNA. This dogma has since been shown to have exceptions, such as reverse transcription in retroviruses.
Non-helical models of DNA structure Non-helical models of DNA structure In the history of molecular biology, non-helical or "side-by-side" models of DNA were proposed in the 1970s as a challenge to the standard double-helical model. The non-helical models attempted to solve problems relating to the topology of circular DNA chromosomes during replication. These theories were briefly considered seriously as a minority viewpoint, but they were later largely rejected due to X-ray crystallography of DNA duplexes and later the nucleosome core particle, as well as the discovery of topoisomerases, and these non-double-helical models are not currently accepted by the mainstream scientific community. The strands of a