A more realistic way of modeling the behavior of nucleic acids would seem to be to have parameters that depend on the neighboring groups on both sides of a nucleotide, giving a table with entries like "TCG/AGC". However, this would involve around 32 groups for Watson-Crick pairing and even more for sequences containing mismatches; the number of DNA melting experiments needed to get reliable data for so many groups would be inconveniently high. However, other means exist to access thermodynamic parameters of nucleic acids: microarray technology allows hybridization monitoring of tens of thousands sequences in parallel. This data, in combination with molecular adsorption theory allows the determination of many thermodynamic parameters in a single experiment and to go beyond the nearest neighbor model. In general the predictions from the nearest neighbor method agree reasonably well with experimental results, but some unexpected outlying sequences, calling for further insights, do exist. Finally, we should also mention the increased accuracy provided by single molecule unzipping assays which provide a wealth of new insight into the thermodynamics of DNA hybridization and the validity of the nearest-neighbour model as well.