In the few years since the first edition of this book made its appearance, under takings in the area of protein sequence determination have increased at an almost logarithmic pace. The logic governing such efforts has, predictably, retreated from a simple sense of curiosity in achieving something that had not previously been done, to be replaced by an absolute requirement for sequence information as the best means for understanding heretofore unattainable aspects of chemical, and structural and functional mechanistic phenomena. Witness, for example, recent volumes of the Annual Review of...

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece Macbeth II iii 72 Whence and what are those execrable shape? Paradise Lost Ib 1 681 Confusion worse confounded Paradise Lost Ib 1 995 When the manuscript for the first part of this book was proposed, it was anticipated that the discussion of the entire field of protein se quencing could be covered in a single volume - from purification and characterization of the protein through fragmentation by chemical or enzymic means and, finally, to reassembly of the identified individual peptides into the reconstructed total sequence. It soon became evident that...