Customer Reviews

Genes and Signals

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Transcription is digital. It was the concept first introduced by François Jacob, André Lwoff and Jacques Monod that won them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965. Switching between ON/OFF states, cells are constantly faced with a decision-making process (to transcibe or not?) that contributes to its fate- be it differentiation (as in development), survival or suicide (as in programmed cell death).
Mark Ptashne is one of the leading gurus in this area of research, especially in the area of transcriptional regulation in prokaryotes (author of the Genetic Switch). In this book, Ptashne and Gann emphasize on how cells execute this elaborate process. Signaling specificity is the major focus in this area of research. How does a cell know when to transcribe a particular gene in response to a signal (extracellular or intracellular)? Put differently, how does the same signal upstream result in a different output (transcription of a particular gene) at any given time? The authors provide answers to such questions and take it a step further by discussing the plasticity or `evolvability' in transcription.
The book is beautifully organized with four chapters (forward by Tony Pawson), from transcription in prokaryotes and lower eukaryotes to metazoans that allows the reader to appreciate the evolutionarily conserved biochemistry behind the process. They drive home the idea of regulated recruitment at the proximal and distal promoter regions of the gene- protein-protein interactions (by cooperrativity and allostery) on DNA involve low affinity interactions, that help increase local concentrations of transcription factors at cis-acting regions. The conclusions are simple and very elegant. The book features excellent illustrations without too many details that one normally encounters with gene structures. The reader is referred to papers and articles that are all categorized under subtitles that complement the text. On-line material at genesandsignals.org provides references that link to Pubmed. The website also features four lectures (one on each chapter) delivered by Ptashne at Rockefeller University. The parts of the book that I most liked were the footnotes. The footnotes in each chapter takes the reader to more details on ongoing research. The entire book is meant to be read beginning from the first chapter. I thoroughly recommend this book that should be used for graduate course work. As a graduate student myself, I found this book extremely helpful and a valuable reference. A definite must-read!

I got this book my freshman year in college, and it seemed as a bit complicated, but when I re-read it my junior year I realized that there were a lot of oversimplifications...

It is a good book to start with---it explains ideas very well with out too much fuss.
However, if you already have a BS in biology or related field you might be better off looking for something more advanced.