General embryological information service - HPS Repository

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Nicolson, Rasmussen, De Petrocellis) ; V. Neural differentiation (Frank,
Macagno)
The title of this book should have contained the word "development". It
is based on a symposium held in Woods Hole, Mass. in September 1976 and is
one of those few symposium volumes that are sure to leave a lasting mark.
All contributions are short to medium-length reviews of very recent work in
a limited area, but they were all obviously prepared with great care and
are well integrated by cross-referencing. A great variety of mostly vertebrate
cells and tissues pass in review, on which the most modern methods
are brought to bear
The book is produced with exemplary care and illustrated, among other
things, with a host of beautiful half-tones.
85.
R.A.LERNER and D.BERGSMA, eds. 1978. THE MOLECULAR BASIS OF CELL-CELL INTER-
ACTION
Liss, New York. Birth Defects: Original Article Series, vol.14, 2.
XVIII, 566 pp., 255 figs., 53 tabs., subject index. $ 58.00
Contents (abridged): I. Cell-surface membrane complex (3 papers); II. Organelles
and supraraolecular assemblies (4); III. Cell surface proteins (8)
IV. Cell-cell interactions (9); V. Communicating cell systems (10); VI.
Cell patterning (2)
More than one third of the 36 papers in this conference report are of
direct interest to developmental biologists. This reflects the fact that cell
interactions (why is the ugly phrase "cell-cell interaction" increasingly
used?) are often best studied in developing systems.
The conference took place some time during 1977 in La Jolla, CA and the
large majority of contributors are Americans. The papers vary widely in
scope; most can be characterised as progress reports. Many developmental
biologists will also be interested in the "non-developmental" papers, particularly
those dealing with lymphocytes and histocompatibility antigens: the
latter are increasingly suspected to have much more profound functions than
those expressed in graft rejection alone.
The papers of primary interest to our readers are in sections IV-VI. The
last section is made up by two brief reviews by Bryant (epimorphic fields)
and Wolpert (chick limb development) . Section V has no less than six papers
on cellular slime moulds, some of them unconnected with the theme of the conference
(genetics and gene expression) . Section IV has a long paper by Boyse
and Cantor on immunogenetical aspects of biological communication, which
contains most interesting speculations. Other papers are on the T-locus of
the mouse, on "cell-adhesion molecules" in chick embryos, and on fertilisation
in mammals and sea urchins.
The volume is well produced and illustrated.
86.
B.I. LORD, C.S.POTTEN and R.J.COLE, eds. 1978. STEM CELLS AND TISSUE HOMEO-
STASIS
Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, etc. Symp. Brit. Soc. Cell Biol. no. 2.
VIII, 368 pp., 73 figs., 20 tabs., combined taxonomic and subject index.
£ 18.50
As Holtzer says on page 2 of this volume, the "problems of the stem cell
are a paradigm for the basic problems of cell diversification". This symposium,
which was held in Manchester in April 1977, was unusual in that many
developing systems were considered from the viewpoint of stem cells (or
rather "cell lineage") which are not usually so considered, e.g. developing
and regenerating limbs (Wolpert), the mammalian embryo (Papaioannou et at.),
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