This volume of the Subcellular Biochemistry series is the result of the long-standing research interest of the editor in the molecular mechanism underlying Alzheimer's disease and other amyloid diseases, indicated also by the earlier book in the series (Volume 38), devoted to Alzheimer's disease. The broad coverage within the present amyloidogenesis book represents an attempt to collate current knowledge relating to the proteins and peptides involved in most of the known amyloid diseases, together with some amyloid/fibril-forming proteins and peptides that are not involved in diseases. Thus,...

In Volume 25, leading experts present studies on the value of increased ascorbic acid intake and explore its specific contributions to human and animal health.

The heterogeneity of topics...is very ambitious, and the result is, overall, successful because of the high quality of the individual contributions....highly recommended.' -American Scientist, from a review of a previous volume Volume 26 examines the emerging areas of signal transduction based on myoinositol phosphates and Ca2+ while focusing on plant and animal responses. Chapters explore synthesis, separation, and identification of different inositol phosphates.

This book contains an extensive collection of critical reviews, from leading researchers in the field of regulated protein degradation. It covers the role of regulated proteolysis in a range of microorganisms (from Gram positive, Gram negative and pathogenic bacteria to Archaea and the Baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae).

Experts investigate the biochemical and biomedical aspects of cholesterol, addressing its metabolism in normal and disease states. They discuss a broad range of topics, including key steps in the cholesterol biosynthetic pathway, and the role of cholesterol in cancer, atherosclerosis, and diseases of the nervous system. The book's comprehensive coverage also includes the pathological consequences and potential therapies for various disease states, and the development of new anti-atherogenic drugs.

In mammalian cells many physiological processes rely on the dynamics of the organization of lipids and proteins in biological membranes. The topics in this volume deal with physicochemical methods in the study of biomembranes. Some of them have a long and respectable history in the study of soluble proteins and have only recently been applied to the study of membranes. Some have tradi- tionally been applied to studies of model systems of lipids of well-defined com- position, as well as to intact membranes. Other methods, by their very nature, apply to organized bilayers comprised of both...

Scientific reviews are now of two complementary types: short, very up-to-date articles, as are found in the Trends series, and the more traditional longer re- views, which are more comprehensive but take longer to publish. The Subcellu- lar Biochemistry series belongs to the latter category where a number of reviews on a broad topic are collected together in the one volume. It has been the aim of this volume to summarize the present state of knowledge of membrane assembly. It is appreciated that some relevant topics have not been included, and an editor's selection is restricted by the many...

In step with the surge of interest in the endoplasmic reticulum, the current volume takes an integrated look at this functionally diverse organelle. Coverage includes protein translocation and export, lipid metabolism, antigen presentation, and many other subjects, gleaned from such diverse fields as cell biology, enzymology and membrane biochemistry, immunology, and signal transduction.

The mycoplasmas, a trivial name used to denote organisms included in the class Mollicutes, are a group of prokaryotic organisms comprising more than 120 species distinguished from ordinary bacteria by their small size and the total lack of cell walls. The absence of a cell wall in mycoplasmas is a characteristic of outstanding importance to which the mycoplasmas owe many of their pecu- liarities, for example, their morphological instability, osmotic sensitivity, unique ion pumping systems, resistance to antibiotics that interfere with cell wall bio- synthesis, and susceptibility to lysis by...

It has been 15 years since the first report on the isolation of anti-Gal from human serum and the demonstration that this antibody is the most prevalent antibody in humans (Galili et al., ]. Exp. Med. 160: 1519, 1984). Subsequent interdisciplinary studies in immunology, carbohydrate biochemistry, molecular biology, and evo- lution demonstrated the highly restricted specificity of anti-Gal for the carbohy- drate epitope Gal al-3Galpl-4GIcNAc-R, (termed here the a-gal epitope), the unprecedented evolutionary pattern of distribution of a-gal and anti-Gal in mam- mals, and explained the evolution...