Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews
edited by
Jeffrey Kovac University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996-1600
Biochemistry of Signal Transduction and Regulation, 2nd Edition by Gerhard Krauss; translated by Nancy Schonbrunner and Julia Cooper Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, Germany, 2001. 493 pp. Includes figures. ISBN: 3527303782 (paperback), $65. reviewed by Vicky Minderhout
The basic principles of signal transduction and regulation are presented in this book for an audience of biochemistry, biology, and chemistry students. The aim is to describe the structural and biochemical properties of signaling molecules and their regulators. This book attempts to fill a gap between our knowledge of signal transduction, which has exploded over the last ten years, and the paucity of pages devoted to the subject in most biochemistry texts. The author is a professor of biochemistry at the University of Bayreuth in Germany who is involved in signal transduction. Specifically, his group examines a class of DNA-binding regulatory proteins that contain a leucine zipper-basic region. This book is not an edited grouping of chapters each written by a different expert, but a book written by one individual. Therefore it more closely resembles a textbook than a monograph except it has no problems. The translation from German is excellent. The first chapter, on the regulation of gene expression (83 pages with 57 figures), provides the essential backdrop for the importance of signaling. It is followed by two additional fundamental chapters: one on the regulation of enzyme activity and another on the function and structure of signaling pathways. The 13 remaining chapters are devoted to specific topics: nuclear receptors, second messengers, receptors with associated tyrosine kinase activity and receptors
with tyrosine-specific protein kinase activity, Ser/Thr-specific protein kinases and protein phosphatases, G-protein coupled pathways Ras proteins, as well as the regulation of cell cycle, oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes, apoptosis, and ion channels. The book is limited to animal systems. References are included at the end of every chapter, mostly review articles, and there is an extensive 11-page subject index at the end of the book. One of the disappointments of this book is that the figures are in black and white with gray tones, rather than in color. However, I have not observed that other specialized books of this nature have color diagrams. While the book does not present distinct pathways unless they prove to be exemplary (e.g., the vision pathway), it does provide a good overview of signaling pathways in general. It certainly provides more detail than is typically found in a biochemistry textbook. I examined a very specialized pathway in immunology with which I am quite familiar, the interferon-γ pathway, and found only a brief overview and a few review articles as references to pursue. However, the coverage of hormone signaling was quite extensive. A quick check of Books in Print reveals that this book represents one of only a few choices for broad coverage of signal transduction, and that there are a limited number of volumes dedicated to specific pathways. This book is probably best for a smaller library with limited resources where purchases of several specialized books concerning very specific pathways would be far more costly. It would serve as a good supplementary reference for an undergraduate or beginning graduate course. Since research into signaling pathways is expanding at a rapid rate, this book and other books on signaling will be out of date in several years. Consequently, the price of this book makes it an attractive interim purchase. Vicky Minderhout is in the Department of Chemistry, Seattle University, Seattle, WA 98122;
[email protected].
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 79 No. 11 November 2002 • Journal of Chemical Education
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