molecular biology books

	Bacterial Artificial Chromosomes: Volume 2: Functional Studies (Methods in Molecular Biology) (Methods in Molecular Biology)
	By: Shaying Zhao, Marvin Stodolsky ISBN: 0896039897 Publisher: Humana Press Release Date: 04 March, 2004 Bioscience book rank: 1211802
	Experiments in Molecular Biology: Biochemical Applications
	By: Zachary F. Burton, Jon M. Kaguni ISBN: 0121473708 Publisher: Academic Press Release Date: 15 January, 1997 Bioscience book rank: 1207655
	Soft Condensed Matter Physics in Molecular and Cell Biology (Scottish Graduate)
	By: W.C.K. Poon, David Andelman ISBN: 0750310235 Publisher: Taylor & Francis Release Date: 13 January, 2006 Bioscience book rank: 577759
	Wood Formation in Trees: Cell and Molecular Biology Techniques
	By: Nigel J Chaffey ISBN: 0415272157 Publisher: CRC Release Date: 10 January, 2002 Bioscience book rank: 2251093
	Microarrays for an Integrative Genomics (Computational Molecular Biology)
	By: Isaac S. Kohane, Alvin Kho, Atul J. Butte ISBN: 0262612100 Publisher: The MIT Press Release Date: 01 September, 2005 Bioscience book rank: 494828	The authors of this book are very excited about the prospects of the field of functional genomics and DNA microarray technology. Their optimism however is tempered by a large degree of caution, for they make it clear in the first few paragraphs of the book that expression profiling using microarrays is still in its infancy and that there have been exaggerated reports of its success. They wrote this book with the intent of giving the reader a more realistic view of microarray technology and have succeeded in their goal. They target the book specifically to experienced biologists and bioinformaticians with limited experience in using microarrays, and to students who are entering the field of bioinformatics. Most importantly, they emphasize that functional genomics is an experimental science, and that highly sophisticated algorithms from data mining or other areas of artificial intelligence will be of no assistance if the experimental information is not there in the first place. They do encourage however further development of these algorithms, in order to be able to extract the data as it becomes available, and as microarray technology itself matures. Even with the current technology, enormous amounts of data are generated, and if sense is to be made of this data, one will have to develop more effective algorithms than what are currently available. <br /> <br />To perform successful experiments, the authors describe a `functional genomics pipeline', and list the characteristics that it must have, consisting of both `wet' (laboratory) and `dry' (computational) steps. They devote a lot of space in the book describing how to develop an effective genomic experiment. Crucial to such investigations they say is a design that maximizes the possibility of observing relevant gene expression patterns, and the `experiment design space', which encapsulates all possible conditions that a particular biological system could be influenced by. Also important to the design is the `expression space', which is the collection of all potential expression values of all genes in a given genome. One could view the expression space as a vector space of high dimension, with each dimension corresponding to a single gene. Of great interest, and widely discussed in the general bioinformatics literature under the guise of the new field of `systems biology' is a subset of the expression space called the `transcriptome.' This subset models the expression of a cellular system under all stimuli. Considering that one might have to deal with 30,000 genes in the case of a human, the characterization of the transcriptome will be a formidable project. Interactions between the genes will complicate the analysis even further. The authors view each experiment as being an exploration of the space of all possible expression patterns, and describe good experimentation as being the `maximal exercise' of the genome. This consists of finding those correlations between the genes that have the greatest impact on the process under scrutiny. <br /> <br />A book on microarrays would not be complete if it did not discuss how they actually function. This is done in a fair detail in chapter three of the book. The authors do not favor a particular vendor but rather discuss what biological assumptions all microarray technology is based on. One of these assumptions is, as expected, that there is a direct connection between mRNA transcription and the protein translation associated with it. <br /> <br />In any laboratory experiment one has to deal with experimental uncertainty or "noise." This involves the influence of unknown external perturbations that result in variability in the outcomes of the experiment. As further evidence that the authors are careful experimenters, they discuss noise in detail, noting first that expression experiments deal with information that is both digital (DNA sequence information) and analog (mRNA expression levels). They distinguish between `intra-chip' noise, which arises when one probe feature influences another, improper scanning techniques, and manufacturing defects, and `inter-chip' noise, which arises from sample variation. Normalization issues are also discussed. Readers should take particular attention to the discussion on fold calculation and significance because of its connection with statistical analysis and because it sets the tone for the rest of the book. In particular, this discussion leads to the very important topic of dissimilarity and similarity measures. This part of the book is more sophisticated mathematically than what has been encountered so far, dealing for example with the concept of a metric space, which may appear to be somewhat abstract by readers who are not mathematically astute. Linear correlation and mutual information are two examples of metrics that are discussed. <br /> <br />Data mining is of course heavily discussed in the book, along with the new field of `ontological engineering' and how the latter is used functional genomics. Data mining is of course a vast field, but the authors give the reader a good taste of how some of its techniques can be applied to analyze microarray experiments. Both unsupervised and supervised learning is discussed, along with `self-organizing maps.' The authors end the book with their vision of future developments. Naturally they point to further refinements in microarray technology, the need for educating a new generation of bioinformaticists, and the push towards the development of new data mining algorithms. Certainly all of these are important, and one can expect other technological developments to occur in the coming years that may prove superior to microarrays in their application to functional genomics. In addition, and there are indications of this even at the present time, one can expect technologies that fully automate the study of gene expression. This includes the generation of hypotheses that characterize scientific investigation, the development and construction of the experiments themselves, and the analysis of the resulting data. This is a well written book that gives an overview of the technology of microarrays and their use as investigative tools in functional genomics experiments. I found the technical and analytical descriptions very easy to follow. This is still the only book around that can bring any investigator with little knowledge of molecular biology, data analysis, and/or microarrays up to speed in the field. It is also a good text book for a graduate level course on microarray data analysis. I am not an informatics researcher, however I hold a doctorate in biotechnology related areas, as well a law degree. I routinely purchase books and journals to keep up. However, the problem with this book is its presentation. It is written in an almost stereotypically pretentious manner to the extent that it clearly detracts from the subject matter's presentation. Did you know that a tissue or cell type may be "interrogated"? Coincedentally, I happened upon a brief review article by the same author in Nature Biotech. Again the writing was such that it was too much of an effort to extract what was being said. For those who feel drawn to this book, check the internal pages on Amazon's site.
	Frontiers of Cellular Bioenergetics: Molecular Biology, Biochemistry, and Physiopathology
	By: S. Papa, Ferruccio Guerrieri, Joseph M. Tager ISBN: 0306458519 Publisher: Springer Release Date: 31 May, 1999 Bioscience book rank: 1309579
	Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology
	By: Alexander Rosenberg ISBN: 0226727297 Publisher: University Of Chicago Press Release Date: 15 September, 2006 Bioscience book rank: 388249	They put it better than I can. From the back of the jacket: <br /> <br />Over the last twenty years and more, philosophers and theoretical biologists have built an antireductionist concensus about biology. We have thought that biology is an autonomous discipline without being spooky. While biological systems are built from chemical ones, biological facts are not just physical facts, and biological explanations cannot be replaced by physical and chemical ones. The most consistent, articulate, informed and lucid skeptic about this view has been Alex Rosenberg, and Darwinian Reductionism is the mature synthesis of his alternative vision. He argues that we can show the paradigm facts of biology--evolution and developnment--are built from the chemical and physical, and reduce to them. Moreover, he argues, unpleasantly plausably, that defenders of the consensus must slip one way or the other: into spookiness about the biological, or into a reduction program for the biological. People like me have no middle way. <br />Kim Sterelny <br /> <br />For most philosophers, reductionism is wrong becase it denies the facts of multiple realizability. For most biologists, reductionism is wrong because it involves a commitment to genertic determinism. In this stimulating new book, Rosenberg reconfigures the problem. His Darwinian reductionism denies genetic determinism, and it has no problem with multiple realizability. It captures what scientific materialism should have been all along. <br />Elliot Sober
	Molecular Approaches to Controlling Cancer (Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology)
	By: Bruce Stillman, David Stewart ISBN: 0879697741 Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press Release Date: 30 August, 2006 Bioscience book rank: 1217138	In the past five years or so there have been a number of interesting developments in cancer diagnosis and therapy. As a result, the National Cancer Institute provided the primary funding for a symposia that for the first time would be devoted to molecular approaches to cancer therapy. It was attended by 515 scientists to hear/see some 71 oral presentations and 241 poster presentations. <br /> <br />This book consists of 59 papers that cover the general topics from the symposia: Cancer Genetics and Genomes; DNA Damage Response; Cancer Biology and Stem Cells; Telomeres, Senescence and Aging; Animal Models for Cancer; Gene Expression and Cancer; Tumor Responses to Microenvironment; Angiogenesis; Discovering Cancer Targets; Therapeutic Approaches. <br /> <br />The authors are specialists in these particular subjects and come from literally around the world.
	Transmembrane Signaling Protocols (Methods in Molecular Biology)
	By: Hydar Ali, Haribabu Bodduluri ISBN: 158829546X Publisher: Humana Press Release Date: 21 February, 2006 Bioscience book rank: 1309892
	Two-Hybrid Systems: Methods and Protocols (Methods in Molecular Biology) (Methods in Molecular Biology)
	By: Paul N. MacDonald ISBN: 0896038327 Publisher: Humana Press Release Date: 15 June, 2001 Bioscience book rank: 1283274