<unk>  is the process, discovered by Alexander Rich, of combining complementary, single-stranded nucleic acids into a single molecule.  Nucleotides will bind to their complement under normal conditions, so two perfectly complementary strands will bind to each other readily. This is called annealing. However, due to the different molecular geometries of the nucleotides, a single inconsistency between the two strands will make binding between them more energetically unfavorable. Measuring the effects of base incompatibility by quantifying the rate at which two strands anneal can provide information as to the similarity in base sequence between the two strands being annealed. Annealing may be reversed by heating the double stranded molecule of DNA (or RNA or DNA:RNA) to break the hydrogen bonds between bases and separate the two strands. This is called melting or denaturation.
Nucleic acid hybridization
Polymerase chain reaction
Nucleic acid amplification technique
Southern blot
Molecular cloning
DNA sequencing
Nucleic acid test
Dot blot