Medical Terminology : A Short Course , 3 rd edition

Multichapter books that focus on methodology often turn out not to be fully satisfying in that most readers will find that only small parts of the books are pertinent to their interests. Although describing the methodology behind genomic and proteomic analysis is an important aspect of this book, it is nicely integrated with the pathophysiology of cardiovascular disease; thus, many readers should find this book to be useful and interesting to read in its entirety. This book is also unique in that a lot of effort has been focused on the use of genomic and proteomic analysis for studying cancer, but this is the first book that comprehensively describes the application of these techniques to cardiovascular disease. The book is composed of 21 chapters, and each is written by a leader in this field of cardiovascular research. The first section is about the gene expression analysis of cardiovascular disease and contains nine chapters: the first provides a nice description of the methodology behind various types of microarray analysis and is followed by a wellwritten chapter on the interpretation of gene expression data. There are several chapters on the genomic analysis of congestive heart failure, using various animal models, a chapter on gene profiling of cardioprotective genes, and a chapter on genes involved in the pathogenesis of atherosclerotic plaques. There is also a chapter on the subtractive hybridization approach for studying genes involved in myocardial ischemia. Most importantly, there are two chapters that discuss possible pitfalls in gene expression analysis and in the interpretation of gene expression data. The proteomic section contains 10 chapters, which describe two-dimensional gel electrophoresis, mass spectrometry of proteins, isotope-coded affinity tags of proteins, and protein chip arrays. There is a chapter that focuses specifically on the proteomic analysis of smooth muscle cells, as well as chapters on the subproteomic analysis of mitochondria, myofilaments, stress-induced factors, and the protein kinase C signaling pathway in the heart. The third and final section of the book contains two chapters on the use of genomic and proteomic analysis for identifying potential new drug targets and for characterizing the mechanism of action and possible toxicity of new drugs. In summary, this book provides a strong foundation in genomic and proteomic methodology and will bring the reader to the forefront in the use of these tools in cardiovascular disease research. Because of the infancy of the field, there is not a lot of information about new biomarkers for routine clinical laboratory testing of cardiovascular diseases, but this is clearly an important goal for this field; hence the book will also be useful for clinical chemists working on developing new diagnostic tests based on genomic and proteomic analysis.