DNA Structure Explorer

This scene renders the DNA double helix first described by Watson JD and Crick FH, “Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid”, Nature 171(4356):737–738 (1953), using the standard modern B-DNA structural constants — a rise of 0.34 nanometres per base pair and roughly 10.5 base pairs per full helical turn — given in Alberts et al., “Molecular Biology of the Cell”, 6th edition (Garland Science, 2015). Every base pair follows the real Watson-Crick complementarity rule: adenine (A) always pairs with thymine (T), and guanine (G) always pairs with cytosine (C).

A sequence abstraction layer shows the same 24-base sequence as a flat, zoomed-out strip — the same idea as a genome browser’s zoomed-out gene track versus its nucleotide-level view — and clicking a base pair in either layer highlights it in both, so the two views always agree. The specific 24-base sequence used is an arbitrary illustrative example, not drawn from any specific real gene or organism; what is real here is the base-pairing rule applied to it and the double helix’s real structural geometry, not the sequence’s biological origin.

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