The dawn of crystallographic activity in India was marked by the determination of the crystal structures of naphthalene and anthracene by K. Banerjee (Nature, 125, 456, 1930) at IACS, Kolkata but G. N. Ramachandran was undoubtedly the most important man in the history of crystallographic studies in India. He was the student of Nobel laureate C. V. Raman. In 1949, Ramachandran was appointed as an Assistant Professor of Physics at IISC, Bangalore and in 1952, with the recommendation of C. V. Raman, he joined the University of Madras as a professor pf physics at the age of 29.

In an initial phase in his career, Ramachandran was in a dilemma; choosing a suitable project which would grab the attention of the scientists at that time. Later, he established a well equipped modern X-ray crystallography laboratory in Madras University. During his doctoral research period in Cambridge, he attended a series of lectures delivered by Pauling on the structural models of the α-helix and β-sheet, which remainedvivid in his memory. In the mean time, Professor J.D. Bernal, who pioneered the use of X-ray crystallography in molecular biology, paid a visit to Madras and suggested that Ramachandran explore the structure of collagen for which no satisfactory models had been proposed at the time. Ramachandran started studying collagen samples collected from kangaroo tail tendon with the assistance of his first post-doctoral fellow G. Kartha and produced a breakthrough of the first triple helical model for the structure of collagen in 1954. Later, he did a survey of all crystal structures of amino acids, peptides and proposed the concept of ‘Ramachandran plot’ which is ranked among the most outstanding contribution to the field structural biology. Source- E. Subramanian, Nature structural biology, 2001, 8, 489-491.