G.N. Ramachandran developed the Ramachandran plot in 1963 to visualize allowed backbone dihedral angles (phi and psi) of amino acid residues in protein structures. The plot shows sterically allowed and disallowed regions for phi-psi torsion angles based on collisions between atoms treated as hard spheres. It has since been used for protein structure validation and improvement of structure determination methods. The favored regions correspond to common secondary structure motifs like alpha helices and beta sheets.