The Meaning (of Structure) in Life

Book Reviews folded up correctly. Of course, these are only a few of the structural biology milestones that have been reached in the last few years, and as much as we cannot afford to mention them all here, Tsonis's book attempts its best Anatomy of Gene Regulation—A Three-to do so. of the main body accompanies the reader through the 282 pp. $50.00 biology. A very useful lending hand is provided by a judicious use of schemes and diagrams that explain how nucleic acids get unraveled, supercoiled, capped, How does a biologist studying the regeneration of tis-or spliced together. In this combination, atomic struc-sues in newts and frogs get to write a great book on tures and simplified diagrams work well together and the molecules of life? A book for the undergraduate and truly let us understand how the process works. Sadly, graduate biochemist and molecular biologist alike. So this synergy is missing in the chapters on transcription, full of amazing protein and nucleic acid structures at to which the book devotes, quite rightly for a book on atomic resolution that it ought to be called " Gene Ex-the regulation of gene expression, a good number of pression's Picture Album " ? Panagiotis Tsonis's new pages. An uninitiated reader will find that this omission book arguably is the first attempt at creating a structural makes it a little difficult to understand the process of biology's " hall-of-fame " for most of the great players transcriptional activation, or indeed to appreciate the in gene regulation, replete with vivid, high resolution differences and similarities between prokaryotic and pictures of polymerases, nucleosomes, and ribosomes, eukaryotic transcription mechanisms, at which the book just to mention a few. In this sense, the book is long does hint. While the section on enhancer-binding pro-overdue. Over the last few years there have been tre-teins and their folds is brilliant, since it illustrates the mendous advances in the determination of the three-various modes that are used by activators to interact dimensional structure of gene regulatory proteins and with DNA, other aspects are a little too concise. What nucleic acid complexes. Yet few books have tried to is missing in the current, first version, of the book, for incorporate " structure " fully, never mind using it as a example, is a good discussion of the function and mech-philosophical approach to explaining and teaching mo-anism of general transcription factors and …