Читать книгу Snyder and Champness Molecular Genetics of Bacteria - Tina M. Henkin - Страница 46

This textbook emphasizes how classical and molecular genetic approaches can be used to solve biological problems. As an educational experience, understanding the methods used and the interpretation of experiments is at least as important as the conclusions drawn. Therefore, whenever possible, the experiments that led to the conclusions are presented. The first two chapters, of necessity, review the concepts of macromolecular synthesis that are essential to understanding bacterial molecular genetics. However, they also introduce more current material, including interesting recent advances in bacterial cell biology. Chapter 1, besides reviewing the basics of DNA replication and the techniques of molecular biology, presents some recent advances in our understanding of how replication is coordinated with other cellular processes. Chapter 2, in addition to reviewing the basics of protein synthesis, presents current developments concerning protein folding, transport, and degradation. Chapter 3, similarly, reviews basic genetic principles, but with a special emphasis on bacterial genetics. Students are not likely to get some of this material in more general genetics courses, at least not in the same depth. This chapter also includes more current applications, such as gene knockouts, reverse genetics, and saturation genetics. Chapters 4 through 12 deal with more specific topics and the techniques that can be used to study them, with particular emphasis on recent evidence concerning the relatedness of seemingly disparate topics. The last chapter, chapter 13, focuses on how the genome is structured, the tools we use to analyze the genome, and even how to construct “new” genomes. We hope that this textbook will help put modern molecular genetics into a historical perspective, bring the reader up to date on current advances in bacterial molecular genetics, and position the reader to understand future developments in this exciting and rapidly progressing field of science.