Caused by new experimental approaches to detect the dynamics of the structure of biological molecules in relation to their biological function results a growing interest in this field. The volume 2 of the Springer Series in Biophysics presents the papers of the conference on "Biophysics and Synchrotron Radiation" held' a t Frascati, Italy, in July 1986. The conference was a meeting-place of the leading scientists in this field (a list of contributors is a t the beginning of the book). The volume is a representative review of this rapidly developing synchrotron radiation facilities. An enormous potential is offered by introducing the .dimension of time into x-ray diffraction, x-ray spectroscopy and x-ray scattering. These are also the headings of the first three chapters of this book. During the last years advances in soft x-ray sources and optics have led to a renewed interest in the field of x-ray microscopy; one contribution is dealing with this problem and future developments. The fifth and last but not least chapter consists of two articles about time-resolved fluorescence. This is also a method (and special advantages with respect to NMR-and ESR-spectroscopy by fluorescence spectroscopy are offered) for investigations on membrane model systems. The synchrotron radiation is widely used for structure analysis (WATSON-CRICK-model of DSA 1953, protein crystallography, . . .), for investigations of DNA-metal ion complexes, reactions of enzymes and biological model compounds and many other special questions of the biophysics. An application to biotechnological problems should be expected in the future.
A. LOSCHE