An early literature review of DNA crystallography

I'm taking a genetic engineering class at a local biohacker space. (Some of you might remember my attempts to teach myself a long time ago. Hopefully this will work better!) It just started, so we're still doing the preliminaries like learning how to pipette and extracting strawberry DNA, which is pretty great fun. During this week's class the subject of how DNA was prepared for Franklin's early crystallography attempts, and no one knew. So I volunteered to do some digging. The results are pretty interesting, despite the best efforts of Nature's paywalls to stop me, so I figured I'd share them here.

( Vaguely organized references and excerpts here )