Gene transfer into mammalian cells. Vectors as Tools for the Study of Normal and Abnormal Growth and Differentiation (1989). NATO ASI Series, Series H: Cell Biology, Volume 34. Edited by H. Lother, R. Dernick and W. Ostertag. Springer-Verlag, Berlin. Pp. 475, DM 238
✍ Scribed by Jozsef Zakany
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1990
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 242 KB
- Volume
- 12
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0265-9247
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
satisfaction one gets from solving an equation. The model builders ought to be satisfied! At the other extreme, David Weisblat and Richard Gardner in their papers on cell lineage show admirable clearness in facing up to our comparative ignorance in the leech and mouse systems respectively. Gardner's previous paper of fifteen years earlier is surprisingly similar: a story of persistence in the face of daunting technical difficulty. The era of triumph with the mouse may not be far off, but meanwhile work on the trusty amphibians proceeds apace. Xenopus is well-represented. Doug Melton's review of his work on the Vgl and Xhox3 genes contains snippets of information not published elsewhere. Janet Heasman and Jonathan Cooke each consider the timing of specification, both proposing that much more patterning happens much earlier (i.e. before gastrulation) than was once thought. Chapters on the Xenopus neural tube floor plate or notoplate (Jessell), cadherin (Takeichi) and the Drosophilu eye (Tomlinson) are all well-written and straightforward, while Eric Davidson's chapter on in vivo titration of regulatory DNA-binding proteins is simply too technical and narrowly molecular to fit comfortably in this volume among more developmental papers. Judith Kimble on the glp-l gene in C. elegans suffers from datedness, if only because she herself has made so much progress since 1988.
Just as Sydney Brenner chaired the Ciba symposium that heralded the triumph of Drosophilu developmental genetics, I would like to think that this symposium chaired by Lewis Wolpert will presage a revolution of the more conceptual problems of gradients and thresholds in morphogenesis, particularly in vertebrate systems. From the discussions presented in this book, I am optimistic.