What occurs during the process of denaturation?

Denaturation primarily refers to the process whereby the structure of a protein or nucleic acid is altered, often due to the application of heat or other stressors, leading to the separation of strands in DNA. In the context of DNA, denaturation involves raising the temperature to a level where the hydrogen bonds holding the two strands of the double helix together break, resulting in the two strands separating. This is a crucial step in techniques such as PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction), where denaturation allows for the amplification of specific DNA sequences by enabling access to the individual strands for primer binding and synthesis.

The other options represent different biological processes. Combining DNA strands pertains to processes like DNA recombination or ligation, and synthesizing RNA from DNA describes the transcription process occurring in a cell. Protein folding involves the arrangement of amino acids into specific three-dimensional structures, which can be influenced but is not a direct result of the denaturation process itself.