All books in one place: This week books

Garret/Grishaam's Biochemistry

My university uses this book for the two-semester biochem sequence for BSc Chemistry/Biochemistry students. It's a well-written book, overall -- lots of information but not a very dense "scientific" read. The best part is the way the authors keep tying things back to reality ... sidebars explain how the dynamics of protein folding affect Alzheimer's disease, or what protease inhibition means for the development of HIV drugs.

The figures are aesthetically pleasing and really help to clarify descriptions in the text. The only problem is that the figures are usually a couple pages away from the text they refer to. For example, when describing the mechanism of chymotrypsin cleavage, it would make a lot more sense to put all the text on the left page and the mechanism/structures on the right page. Instead, the text is about three pages before the mechanism, meaning the reader has to keep flipping back and forth trying to understand what is going on. It's like that in most if not all cases. Not a big deal, but it's the sort of thing the layout editor should have realized when putting the book together. Maybe they'll fix it in the fourth edition.

Advances in Cancer Research

Volume 70 begins with two "Foundations in Cancer Research" articles, a staple of the Advances in Cancer Research series. The first article by Michael Stoker presents a review of some of the early advances made by cancer cell biology researchers. The second article by Emmanuel Farber describes the methods by which researchers delineate the phenotype of cells and ways to alter these phenotypes to prevent or delay carcinomas. Chidambaram and Dean illustrate the tumors and associated malformations of nevoid basal cell carcinoma. Koli and Keski-Oja review the effects of how transforming growth factor-b regulates cell proliferation, differentiation, and morphogenesis and its regulation by the steroid hormone superfamily. Jean-Marc Lemaitre and colleagues discuss the involvement of protooncogenes in the control of the cell cycle and embryonic development with specific attention paid to c-Myc expression and c-Myc function. A review of the various studies involving tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and their possible role in cancer prevention is presented by Steven Rosenberg and co-workers. Finally, Bruce Ponder and Darrin Smith review the genetic and biological aspects of multiple endocrine neoplasia type-2 syndromes and the phenotypes associated with ret mutations.

Protein - Protein Interaction

Regulation of Gene Expression in the Tumor Environment

It is now becoming very clear that the development and progression of tumor towards the malignant (metastatic) phenotype depends tightly on the interaction between the tumor cells and the tumor microenvironment. Tumor cells respond to stimuli generated within the tumor microenvironment for their growth advantage while the tumor cell themselves reshape and remodel the architecture and function of their extracellular matrices. The term tumor microenvironment is a wide umbrella consisting of stromal cells such as fibroblasts and endothelial cells and infiltration immune cells including T and B cells, macrophages, and other inflammatory cells (PMNs). These different components of the tumor microenvironment could have stimulatory and inhibitory effects on tumor progression by regulating the gene expression repertoire within the tumor cells on one hand and the stroma cells on the other. In this volume we have seven contributors who will discuss several different aspects on the cross talk within the tumor microenvironment components leading to the acquisition of the metastatic phenotype. It is our hope that

these state-of-the-art studies will shed further light on our understanding of these complicated processes.

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