Integrative and Comparative Biology Advance Access originally published online on June 22, 2007
Integrative and Comparative Biology 2007 47(5):794-795; doi:10.1093/icb/icm066
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Book Review |
The Cell Cycle, Principles of Control. David O. Morgan.
Department of Zoology, North Carolina
State University
Correspondence: E-mail: jane_lubischer{at}ncsu.edu
The Cell Cycle, Principles of Control. David O. Morgan.New Science Press, 2007. 297 pp. 273 illustrations ISBN-13: 98-0199206100 (paperback), $49.95.
Cell division is a truly amazing dance of cellular components, tightly regulated to ensure transmission of genetic material with high fidelity and under the appropriate conditions. Not surprisingly, the control mechanisms of this process so essential to life as we know it are highly conserved. This book provides a valuable current resource on cell division, with a focus on the molecular mechanisms controlling the eukaryotic cell cycle. The author does a good job throughout the book of drawing from different model systems, highlighting differences, emphasizing common mechanisms, and clarifying species-specific terminology.
The book is comprehensive, with a wealth of helpful figures, including many reprinted or adapted from the original articles. Figures also are available online to all readers, in both JPEG and TIFF formats (http://www.new-science-press.com/browse/cellcycle/resources). The contents in full provide a coherent outline of the text. The glossary, index, and reference list are thorough. Instructors who adopt the book for class sizes of 15 or more students also have access to additional online resources, including the full text online, as well as updates (with an option to receive e-mail alerts) and a wonderful feature that makes it extremely easy to select figures from the text and put them into a PowerPoint file. The file is then sent to you via e-mail, ready for editing. Students (and others) also will appreciate the affordable price.
The Cell Cycle is one in a series of resource books in biology built on a modular design concept. (Other titles available in this series are "Immunity" and "Protein Structure and Function." Planned titles include "Cell Signaling," "Genetics," and "Molecular Biology.") Each module consists of two facing pages, with relevant figures, glossary terms, and references included on those two pages. The modules are organized by topic into chapters, and each chapter begins with an overview module.
Although the design is modular, there is a logical progression through topics, such that one can use this book either as a textbook, covering modules in the order presented, or as a reference, referring to modules as needed. The first three chapters form a foundation on which the rest of the book builds. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the basics of the cell cycle and includes a useful preview of the entire book in the first module. Chapter 2 presents an introduction to the work horses of the field—yeast, Xenopus laevis, Drosophila melanogaster, and mammalian cell culture—and the relative advantages of each model system. It is not clear why there is not a separate module on Caenorhabditis elegans, which receives only a paragraph stuck awkwardly in the section on Drosophila within the overview module for that chapter. A detailed overview of cell-cycle control follows in Chapter 3. Although this chapter is not lacking in detail, Chapters 4–8 delve even more deeply into different aspects of cell-cycle control: chromosome duplication, early mitosis, assembly of the mitotic spindle, the final events of mitosis, and cytokinesis. The remaining chapters address the related topics of meiosis; control of cell proliferation, growth, and death; response to DNA damage; and cancer.
The modular organization makes this a convenient book for reference, and students will like the idea of having each topic succinctly summarized, with supporting material, in a readily identifiable unit. The challenge of a modular approach, however, is to provide coherent, self-contained units without losing continuity throughout the book. In general, this book works, although improvements could be made both to strengthen individual modules and to enhance the interconnectedness among modules. One example is in the selection of key terms in each module to highlight and include in the glossary. Glossary terms (bold in the text) are listed at the end of the book, but also within each module, which is a reader-friendly touch. Each term, however, is apparently listed only in the primary module in which it is discussed and not in every module in which it plays a critical role. This decision takes away from the modular concept, since a word that should be in bold and defined within the module is not highlighted because it has been (or will be) listed in a different module. To support a truly modular design, some redundancy would seem to be in order. Redundant entries could include a reference to the primary module for that term, enabling the reader to quickly and easily follow that ‘link’ to the relevant module, rather than having to look into the appendix. This is, perhaps, a matter of greater importance for those new to the field (scientists from outside the area or students) than for those with a more solid grounding in the field.
Including more internal references (i.e., indicating other modules in which a given topic is covered in some detail) would also help enhance the interconnectedness of modules. If one is using this book as reference, it would be nice to be able to easily jump (forward or backward) from one module to another. If one is reading through the modules in order, it would help if it were made clear how each module relates to others and fits within the larger picture. The overview modules presented at the beginning of each chapter should help in this regard, but they sometimes fall into the trap of presenting too much detail too soon, and often do not provide an explicit preview of what will be covered in the chapter. (Quality varies—the introductory module in Chapter 10 on cell proliferation and growth does the best job and that in Chapter 8 on cytokinesis does the worst, with most somewhere in between).
Minor criticisms aside, however, this book is a valuable resource on the cell cycle and its molecular control, written clearly and concisely, with an organization that should be useful both to those in the field looking for a review of key concepts and those outside the field hoping to gain an understanding of the current state of knowledge regarding molecular mechanisms underlying the cell cycle.
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