AbstractWe show that the fine oscillatory structure of the DNA melting curve can be used to determine explicitly the nucleotide composition and the order of certain domains within the DNA. If DNA is specifically fragmented, the order of fragments can be learned directly from a comparison of the differential melting curves of the nonfragmented and fragmented DNA. The indicated information may complement exact methods of DNA sequencing. The proposed analysis is applied to bacteriophage ϕX‐174, whose melting curve is known. Compared to the known ϕX‐174 DNA sequence, the results of the analysis are found to be very accurate.