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Put a useful book on the coffee table in your lab

Bioprobes: Biochemical Tools for Investigating Cell Function

Institut Curie, Paris, France

edited by H. Osada. Springer-Verlag (2000) 319 pages. ISBN 4-431-70247-4 £86/$149

Bioprobes: Biochemical Tools for Investigating Cell Function, edited by H. Osada, is not the sort of book I have bought in the past. Maybe I was wrong. This review has been an opportunity to test my prejudice.

The 319 pages of this book are divided into two parts. The first part reviews four main fields in which bioprobes have been crucial to our understanding of biological function. The second part, ‘Bioprobes at a glance’, describes the structure, biological applications and biological activities of 80 chemicals and gives a bit of historical background: who discovered each product, when and how. I like that.

Discoveries of toxins or small molecules from microorganisms have provided tools that can be exquisitely specific (although you never know...) and have allowed us to decipher complex pathways by hitting specific targets and asking what happens. This has proven to be invaluable, not only in signal transduction but also in addressing basic biological questions - for example, who hasn’t learnt about the use of actinomycin D to attribute neosynthesis to transcription or to post-transcriptional mechanisms? Actinomycin D is included here.

The first part of the book covers in four chapters cell proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis and immune cell functions, and the authors give an overview of each field. They point at steps in which the use of microorganism-generated chemicals (bioprobes) have provided a means to define and to understand cellular functions by blocking a specific target(s). Although this is nice and easily readable, the question is who is the book written for. For scientists, the book is definitively not up to date (by definition), not even for someone outside the field. For students, it could not be a textbook. However, the book does adequately show how, at some crucial stage, microorganisms gave (and still give) us the right tools to answer questions.

The second part of the book is like a (almost) comprehensive Merck index of more than 80 bioprobes and includes very useful information about each product - for example, structure, solubility, IC₅₀ and references. This is nice, but then one needs to buy a subscription for a regular on-line update. Some products, although mentioned in the text (e.g. LY294002 and PD98059), are not described in this second part. Also missing are the bacterial toxins that are so useful in switching on or off overlapping sets of GTPases and have been so widely used in studies of Rho GTPases. In addition, comparing the efficiencies, specificities and handiness of chemicals that target overlapping sets of proteins or the same protein could also have been very helpful.

So, back to the question who is this book written for. My answer is librarians.

This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Camonis, J. Search for Related Content PubMed Articles by Camonis, J.