A commentary on the ABC consortium and its impact on the development of mesoscopic models of DNA.

In this commentary, it is presented how the Ascona B-DNA (ABC) consortium analyses of the DNA structure and deformability had a great influence in the development of mesoscopic models of DNA. The generation of databases using molecular dynamics ensembles to describe the DNA flexibility, allowed mesoscopic models to improve and become more accurate with a quality similar to that of all-atom MD simulations. All this will be translated in the future in the development of mesoscopic methods that could study and reproduce large biological systems such as chromatin structure, nucleosome arrangements, and protein recognition.