Base Pairing
Careful examination of the purine and pyrimidine base components of the nucleotides reveals that three of them could exist as hydroxy pyrimidine or purine tautomers, having an aromatic heterocyclic ring. Despite the added stabilization of an aromatic ring, these compounds prefer to adopt amide-like structures. These options are shown in the following diagram, with the more stable tautomer drawn in blue.

A simple model for this tautomerism is provided by 2-hydroxypyridine. As shown on the left below, a compound having this structure might be expected to have phenol-like characteristics, such as an acidic hydroxyl group. However, the boiling point of the actual substance is 100º C greater than phenol and its acidity is 100 times less than expected (pKa = 11.7). These differences agree with the 2-pyridone tautomer, the stable form of the zwitterionic internal salt.
Note that this tautomerism reverses the hydrogen bonding behavior of the nitrogen and oxygen functions (the N-H group of the pyridone becomes a hydrogen bond donor and the carbonyl oxygen an acceptor).

The additional evidence for the pyridone tautomer, that appears above by clicking on the diagram, consists of infrared and carbon nmr absorptions associated with and characteristic of the amide group. The data for 2-pyridone is given on the left. Similar data for the N-methyl derivative, which cannot tautomerize to a pyridine derivative, is presented on the right.

Once they had identified the favored base tautomers in the nucleosides, Watson and Crick were able to propose a complementary pairing, via hydrogen bonding, of guanosine (G) with cytidine (C) and adenosine (A) with thymidine (T). This pairing, which is shown in the following diagram, explained Chargaff's findings beautifully, and led them to suggest a double helix structure for DNA.
Before viewing this double helix structure itself, it is instructive to examine the base pairing interactions in greater detail. The G#C association involves three hydrogen bonds (colored pink), and is therefore stronger than the two-hydrogen bond association of A#T. These base pairings might appear to be arbitrary, but other possibilities suffer destabilizing steric or electronic interactions. . The C#T pairing on the left suffers from carbonyl dipole repulsion, as well as steric crowding of the oxygens. The G#A pairing on the right is also destabilized by steric crowding (circled hydrogens).

A simple mnemonic device for remembering which bases are paired comes from the line construction of the capital letters used to identify the bases. A and T are made up of intersecting straight lines. In contrast, C and G are largely composed of curved lines. The RNA base uracil corresponds to thymine, since U follows T in the alphabet.