Biological systems are governed by molecular interactions. At the core of all biological systems is the processing of nucleic acids, and preserving the fidelity of the genome is crucial to those systems. This manuscript follows different biological systems interrogated by nuclear magnetic resonance: the structural impact of single ribonucleotide damage in DNA, the formation of oligomeric protein-DNA complexes of an ETS family transcription factor, how methylation affects the charge state of the amino acid arginine and how the base pair opening rates of an oligonucleotide is affected by inosine.