Pre-clinical medicine: basic sciences

The HLA molecules are important regulators of the immune response through mediating antigen presentation and interaction between key immune mediating cells.

Genetic toxicology is recognized by geneticists and researchers concerned with the genetic impact of man-made chemicals.

The emerging field of prenatal gene therapy is founded on scientific and technical advances in fetal medicine, molecular biology and gene therapy.

Homologous recombination is important in various aspects of DNA metabolism, including damage repair, replication, telomere maintenance, and meiosis, and yeast genetics has successfully provided a framework for the mechanism of homologous recombination.

In Post-Transcriptional Gene Regulation, renowned authors present current technical approaches to most aspects of post-transcriptional control and provide a useful and versatile laboratory bench resource.

Today, progress in rAAV-mediated gene transfer is so robust that long-term, efficient, and regulatable transgene expression is reproducibly achieved in large animal models.

The field of epigenetics has grown exponentially in the past decade, and a steady flow of exciting discoveries in this area has served to move it to the forefront of molecular biology.

Neutrophil Methods and Protocols provides a concise set of protocols for assessing basic neutrophil functions, investigating specialized areas in neutrophil research, and completing step-by-step diagnostic assays of common neutrophil disorders.

In Gene Therapy Protocols, Volumes 1 & 2, internationally recognized investigators describe cutting-edge laboratory techniques for the study of Production and In Vivo Applications of Gene Transfer Vectors (Volume 1) and Design and Characterization of Gene Transfer Vectors (Volume 2).

A highly anticipated update of the previous edition, In Vitro Transcription and Translation Protocols, Second Edition, provides molecular biology laboratories with the most powerful techniques for exploiting in vitro transcription and translation systems.

Major advances in molecular biology, alternative RNA splicing, protein processing, identification of gene control elements, transgenic animals and bioinformatics open up multiple research avenues and allow for better understanding of neuropeptide production and function.

In this highly anticipated update of the extremely successful Protein Targeting Protocols, experts from around the world provide the latest protocols on for isolating different organelles and the localization of particular proteins using a variety of methods such as light, confocal, and electron microscopy.

Quantum Dots captures many diverse applications enabling utility in biological detection.

Understanding gene expression and how it changes under normal and pathological conditions is essential to our understanding of the fundamentals of cell biology through to the targeted treatment of disease.

The study of the extracellular matrix (ECM) and its diverse roles in tissue scaffolding and cellular signaling in both physiological and pathological processes has significantly expanded over the past decade.

The feld of regenerative medicine is in its infancy state.

In the past few years, the application of proteomics to examine the molecular mechanisms underlying (mal-)functioning of the nervous system and brain disorders has risen steeply, which in many cases has yielded novel insights.

The tiny microRNAs (miRNAs) can have huge impacts on the regulation of a variety of genes and play crucial roles in the fundamental cellular processes.

Together with early theoretical work in population genetics, the debate on sources of genetic makeup initiated by proponents of the neutral theory made a solid contribution to the spectacular growth in statistical methodologies for molecular evolution.

The huge potential for gene therapy to cure a wide range of diseases has led to high expectations and a great increase in research efforts in this area, particularly in the study of delivery via viral vectors, widely considered to be more efficient than DNA transfection.

Immunoinformatics: Predicting Immunogenicity In Silico is a primer for researchers interested in this emerging and exciting technology and provides examples in the major areas within the field of immunoinformatics.

Since each human is genetically distinctive, responding differently to disease-causing factors as well as drugs, the field pharmacogenomics arose to develop personalized medicine, or medicine that deals with the complexity of the human body.

The effort to sequence the human genome is now moving toward a c- clusion.

Grown exponentially by the genomic revolution, the use of the rat as a model of choice for physiological studies continues in popularity and at a much greater depth of understanding.

Applying neurophysiological methods to the study of brain-behavior relationships proved to be a major advance in the early days of neuroscience research.

Despite the many milestones in cystic fibrosis (CF) research, progress toward curing the disease has been slow, and it is increasingly difficult to grasp and use the already wide and still growing range of diverse methods currently employed to study CF so as to understand it in its multidisciplinary nature.

Now a major approach in the identification of certain gene product functions, reverse chemical genetics allows the identification of target genes to precede phenotypic changes created by specific small molecules.

Extensive studies have been conducted on the identification, biogenesis, and processing of microRNA (miRNA) as well as research on the exact mechanism by which miRNAs bring about translational silencing of their targets.

Arthritis Research: Methods and Protocols is a compendium of data pertinent to the methods and protocols that have contributed to recent advances in molecular medicine in general, but to the molecular basis of rheumatic disease in particular.

PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) are the third and most-recently discovered group of silencing-inducible small RNAs in animals.

The rapid pace of microRNA (miRNA) research continues to drive the advances of techniques for miRNA expression profiling, and innovative technologies that are more sensitive, specific, quantitative, and that are compatible with a wide range of biospecimens have been developed during the past few years.

Continued refinement of wide-spread access to transgenic technology has allowed for new animal models have been developed that exhibit features of autoimmune disease have been developed that exhibit features of autoimmune disease.

Molecular Toxicology Protocols, Second Edition aims to bring together a series of articles describing validated methods to elucidate specific molecular aspects of toxicology, the emphasis being on the application of molecular methods to genetic toxicology.

Homing Endonucleases: Methods and Protocols aims at providing molecular biologists with a comprehensive resource to identify and characterize homing endonucleases from genomic sequence, to deduce the biological basis of binding and cleavage specificity, as well as to provide protocols to redesign endonuclease target specificity for genome-editing applications.

Evolving technologies starting with tracer studies, and more recently with genomics and proteomics, have provided novel information about the molecular properties of cerebral endothelium and astrocytes; however, further studies must be done in animal models of neurological diseases and in humans to get a clearer understanding of the pathogenesis of blood-brain barrier (BBB) breakdown in nervous system diseases.

Population genomics is a recently emerged discipline, which aims at understanding how evolutionary processes influence genetic variation across genomes.

Despite the best efforts of many and despite landmark discoveries and experimental ingenuity, challenges in the pursuit of research related to olfactory receptors (ORs) continue to exist.

Due to the vital biological importance of RNA and proteins functioning together within a cell, a protocol volume describing experimental procedures to study their interactions should find a home in many laboratories.

In the past decade, molecular biology has been transformed from the art of cloning a single gene to a statistical science measuring and calculating properties of entire genomes.

Microarrays for simultaneous measurement of redundancy of RNA species are used in fundamental biology as well as in medical research.

Recent stem cell research has revealed that miRNA and RNAi-mediated gene regulation is one of the vital determinates controlling the state of cell differentiation, with the small RNAs serving as key elements involved in regulatory network control of pluripotent cell fate determination.

The aim of Single Cell Diagnostics: Methods and Protocols is for all readers to extend their knowledge and expertise in analysis of single cells.

The generation of genetically modified mice is absolutely crucial to gene function studies today, primarily because mice are genetically similar to man and because gene function studies in mice are in the context of a whole organism, making them particularly useful.

Focusing on in vitro and intracellular RNA structure formation, RNA Folding: Methods and Protocols provides a comprehensive collection of experimental protocols which are suitable to dissect RNA folding pathways and to characterize the structure of RNA folding intermediates at nucleotide or even atomic resolution.

Research into ancient DNA began more than 25 years ago with the publication of short mitochondrial DNA sequence fragments from the quagga, an extinct relative of the zebra.

The past decade has seen the emergence of a new field of scientific inquiry at the intersection of phylogenetics and genomics: phylogenomics.

Since the publication of the popular first edition, the explosion of DNA sequence information, the access to bioinformatics and mutation databases coupled with the ability to readily detect and confirm mutations has cemented the role of molecular diagnostics in medicine and, in particular, mutation detection by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).