Major Advance Made On DNA Structure

Oregon State University researchers have made significant new advances in determining the structure of all possible DNA sequences -- a discovery that in one sense takes up where Watson and Crick left off, after outlining in 1953 the double-helical structure of this biological blueprint for life. One of the fundamental problems in biochemistry is to predict the structure of a molecule from its sequence -- this has been referred to as the "Holy Grail" of protein chemistry. Today, the OSU scientists announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have used X-ray crystallography to determine the three-dimensional structures of nearly all the possible sequences of a macromolecule, and thereby create a map of DNA structure.