Biomolecular structure chemical probing, hydroxyl radical probing, nucleotide analog interference mapping (NAIM), and in-line probing. Protein and nucleic acid structures can be determined using either nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) or X-ray crystallography or single-particle cryo electron microscopy (cryoEM). The first published reports for DNA (by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling in 1953) of A-DNA X-ray diffraction patterns—and also B-DNA—used analyses based on Patterson function transforms that provided only a limited amount of structural information for oriented fibers of DNA isolated from calf thymus. An alternate analysis was then proposed by Wilkins et al. in 1953 for B-DNA X-ray diffraction and scattering
Francis Crick the protein alpha helix a few years earlier. The Watson and Crick discovery of the DNA double helix structure was made possible by their willingness to combine theory, modelling and experimental results (albeit mostly done by others) to achieve their goal. The DNA double helix structure proposed by Watson and Crick was based upon "Watson-Crick" bonds between the four bases most frequently found in DNA (A, C, T, G) and RNA (A, C, U, G). However, later research showed that triple-stranded, quadruple-stranded and other more complex DNA molecular structures required Hoogsteen base pairing. The entire field of synthetic biology began