Book Review: Function and Regulation of Cellular Systems: Experiments and Models. By A. Deutsch, J. Howard, M. Falcke and W. Zimmermann
✍ Scribed by Wolfgang Schreiner
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2006
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 31 KB
- Volume
- 48
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0323-3847
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The book comprises a collection of self-contained articles, each of which deal with a special aspect of modelling cellular function and regulation. Some chapters may be considered as reviews, in the first place give an excellent survey over the subject area and provide comprehensive references to the literature. Other chapters are more in-depth treatments, resembling primary research articles or summaries of those. Still another type of chapters extends into the theory of science, e.g. in discussing the rationale of reducing a system into its components in order to obtain a model. Another similar point of discussion is seen in tracing optimization principles at work during phylogenesis, surmizing that optimization has been carried out at least locally.
Knowledge prerequisites required for understanding the chapters of this book differ widely. Some contributions give excellent introductions for everyone new in the field (e.g. "Micromechanics of molecular motors"). Other chapters discuss opinions of experts which, however, can be estimated only on the basis of a sound knowledge of the current state of the art. For a novice, such discussions of other people's work may lie beyond limits. Only in very few places high-end mathematics is used.
All in all the book is worth reading for anyone who is interested in an overview over the field of computational modeling in biomedicine but it will be helpful also as a qualified seed to plunge into one of the specialized fields.