Medical Genetics

symposium begins with a general lecture on the structure of fibrous proteins by G. N. Ramachandran (32 pages) and is then divided into three parts which contain papers on, respectively, the structure of collagen, the chemistry and metabolism of collagen, and the physical chemistry of variously modified collagens. It should be stated at the outset that this book will not fill the need of the biochemist who wants a summary of the current state of research on collagen structure or metabolism. The section on structural studies fails to give a complete picture because no presentation of the views of Rich and Crick is included. The chemical work on collagen structure has progressed so far since the end of 1960 as to make these papers largely out-dated. In addition, one gets the impression that an unfortunately high percentage of these papers are not of sufficient interest, either as reports of new work or as reviews of present knowledge, to warrant publication in book form. Another less serious fault of this volume is that the variety of subjects is such that only a fraction of the papers are apt to be of interest (or comprehensible) to a single reader. Presumably an X-ray crystallographer would find the first third of the book interesting and a physical chemist interested in polymers might find papers of value in the last third. The very nice opening lecture by G. N. Ramachandran provides an interesting description, in terms intelligible to the non-crystallographer, of the sort of reasoning that has been used at arriving at the three dimensional structures of fibrous proteins. The majority of the following papers on structural studies present detailed X-ray diffraction work from the laboratory of Ramachandran on collagen and feather keratin. A very interesting general paper by V. Sasisekharan on the use of stereochemical considerations in formulating probable structures for proteins is also included. The second section of the symposium on "Medical and Biochemical Studies" is distinctly disappointing. The most extensive and interesting experimental work presented is that from the laboratories of, respectively, Orekhovitz, Gallop and Grassmann, and in all three cases the papers are now largely out-dated by subsequent information concerning the structure of collagen's alpha chains, the nature of the unusual linkages present in it, and the composition of its polypeptide chains. The last section contains a miscellany of physical chemical and electron microscopical studies on collagen fibers and their derivatives.