Examination of the tables of contents of journals - biochemical, molecular biological, ultrastructural, and physiological-provides convincing evidence that membrane biology will be in the 1970s what biochemical genetics was in the 1960s. And for good reason. If genetics is the mechanism for main taining and transmitting the essentials of life, membranes are in many ways the essence of life. The minimal requirement for independent existence is the individualism provided by the separation of "life" from the environment. The cell exists by virtue of its surface membran . One might define the...

The contributions of electron microscopy to membrane biology have been indispensable and, at the same time, disappointing. Membranes were known to exist before the advent of electron microscopy and general principles of their composition and molecular organization had been deduced from permeability and electrical conductivity measurements, polarized light microscopy, and X-ray diffraction. On the other hand, the complexities of the many intracellular membranes and membranous organelles were really not suspected until they were observed by the electron microscopist. One then had further hopes...

The purposes of this senes were discussed in the preface to Volume I: to present "a range of methods . . . from the physical to the physiological . . . in sufficient detail for the reader to use them in his laboratory" and also to describe "the theoretical backgrounds of the methods and their limita tions in membrane biology" so that the reader will be enabled "to evaluate more critically and to understand more fully data obtained by methods foreign to his] usual experiences. " The chapter by Lee, Birdsall, and Metcalfe with which Volume 2 begins accomplishes these twin goals with a thorough...

Three articles make up Volume 10 of Methods in Membrane Biology. In the first of these, Papahadjopoulos, Poste, and Vail extensively review much of the available data on the fusion of natural membranes, model membranes (liposomes), and natural membranes with liposomes. The authors are led by their review of the experimental methods and their interpretations of the results obtained to a general theory of membrane fusion which they believe is applicable to all systems that have been studied. Arguing that although protein and carbohydrate may serve, in some cases, to bring membranes into...

The short period since the publication of Volume 1 of Methods in Membrane Biology has been a time of momentous progress. Calorimetry, electron spin and nuclear magnetic resonance, X-ray diffraction, and freeze-cleavage electron microscopy, reinforced by biochemical analyses and enzymatic studies, have led to universal acceptance of a generalized membrane model. All membrane biologists would agree that a major element of all biological membranes is a bilayer of phospholipids which, in some instances, also contains other lipids, notably sterols and glycolipids. The fatty acid com- position of...

Although not the only volume in this series in which lipids are discussed, the present volume is devoted entirely to methods for the study of membrane lipids. Even now, when membrane proteins are properly receiving so much attention, this emphasis on membrane lipids is appropriate. Essentially all of the phospholipids and sterols of cells are in membranes. Moreover, although membrane proteins are certainly of utmost importance, the more we learn about the functional properties of membrane proteins, the more we appreciate the unique features of phospholipids, without which biological membranes...

One property common to all cells is transport. Molecules and ions must enter and leave cells by crossing membranes in a controlled manner. The process may take any of several forms: simple diffusion, carrier-mediated diffusion, active transport, or group translocation. There is more than one way to measure each. Transport kinetics, with particular reference to the red blood cell, were discussed in a previous volume. Three chapters deal with the general subject of transport in this volume. Maloney, Kashket, and Wilson summarize the appropriate methodology for studying metabolite and ion...

Volume 3 continues the approach carried out in the first two volumes of this se ries of publishing articles on membrane methodology which include, in addition to procedural details, incisive discussions of the ap- plications of the methods and of their limitations. Wh at is the theoretical basis of the method, how and to what problems can it be applied, how does one interpret the results, what has thus far been achieved by the method, what lies in the future-these are the questions the authors have tried to answer. No area of membrane biology engages the interest of more investigators than...

Less than a year before this writing, a Nobel Prize was shared by Albert Claude, Christian de Duve, and George Palade, pioneers in the development of modern cell biology, of which membrane biology is an integral part. For many years, a seemingly unbridgeable gap separated the physiologist working at the organ level from the biochemist studying the molecular composition of cell constituents and the chemical reactions that occur in water-soluble extracts of cells. Physiology has a long history, and the disciplines epitomized by intermediary metabolism and molecular biology progressed rapidly...