Volume 2

Gene expression / Benjamin Lewin.

  • Lewin, Benjamin.
Date:
1974-1977
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Gene expression / Benjamin Lewin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/1192 (page VII)
    Preface Any relationship between this book and the previous edition is almost coin cidental. During the past three years of writing, at times it has seemed that research might advance more rapidly than the results could be incorporated into the text. This has indeed been a period of such extraordinary progress that only a completely new book could do justice to the subject. This vol ume therefore shares with its predecessor only the same general aim: to pro vide a contemporary account of our knowledge of the organization and ex pression of eucaryotic genes. This book is, of course, the second part of the series Gene Expression, in which I hope eventually to provide a full and unifying account of the structure and function of the genetic apparatus of both procaryotes and eucaryotes, plasmids and viruses. The first and third volumes, Procaryotic Genomes and Plasmids and Phages, consider the fun damental processes of nucleic acid and protein synthesis and their control in bacteria, both uninfected and infected. Eucaryotic Chromosomes is intended to delineate present knowledge of the structure of the chromosome and its constituent genetic units and to define the operations by which genes are expressed in the form of protein. The principal questions that are addressed remain the same as in the first edition of six years ago: what is the structure of the chromosome at the level of interaction between DNA and protein; how is chromosome behavior to be explained at the molecular level; why is there so much DNA and what is the nature of the genetic unit; how is expression of the gene controlled? But the answers are different. The discovery of the nucleosome as the basic subunit of chromatin should lead eventually to the definition of the ultra- structure of the chromosome itself in terms of macromolecular organiza tion. The striking discovery that genes are not continuous sequences of DNA but have interrupted, mosaic structures leads to a new view of the nature of the genetic unit and the pathways for its expression. Together, these and other substantial advances that have been overshadowed only by this dramatic extension of horizons, have created a sense of momentum reminiscent of the now classical molecular biology of the sixties. The rapidity of progress has left a pressing need for a comprehensive treatment to bring together these new views. In this book I hope to provide a critical assessment of the state of the art created by these advances. To define the limits of present knowledge I have in this book drawn on original data vu