Malcolm Muggeridge related that the fiction reviewer on the Manchester Guardian (a wan and furtive figure) would receive his consignment of novels every week through a hatch in the wall of his office. The hatch would close and there was said to follow the sounds of groaning and of a head being beaten against the wall. Such is one’s first inclination when the envelope from the Journal disgorges a limp paperback, printed in photo-offset, with the limp title Membrane Proteins: Isolation and Characterization. What, another? Have we not been here before? What about Methods in Membrane Biology and all those stout volumes on ‘Biomembranes’ in Methods in Enzymology, not to mention the unending series of NATO Symposia in red and white covers?
The editors here have indeed found a slightly different formula. This is in fact the third in a series, based on a three-times repeated (therefore, one may presume, successful) course on the subject, supported by FEBS, helped out by the Italian CNR. “The success of the course and the continuous development in the field of membrane biology has prompted me,” the three authors (speaking presumably in unison) assert in their preface, “to publish also in this case the protocols of the experiments which were carried out by the students”. This leads to lists of requirements for the experiment of the day, embracing such props as ‘lOOmM-sodium chloride’ and ‘NMR spectrometer’. They will not all be accessible to all readers.
The experiments, 19 in number, are set out with an introduction, explaining the principles and theory in varying degrees of detail. They range from routine, even rather trivial, procedures (correction of absorption spectra for scattering by logarithmic extrapolation, for example) to something approaching current research. There is for instance a positively heroic project entitled ‘Membrane signal tranduction via protein kinase C’, which encompasses preparation of neutron-phils, and of a crude kinase from rat brain, lipid analysis by TLC, assay for calcium- and phosphatidyl-serine-stimulated phosphorylation, and binding of phorbol ester to the kinase.
One of the longest sections is on molecular weight determination of membrane proteins (that is to say, proteins solubilized in detergents) by gel filtration and sedimentation. In this instance the students are not given the best advice, for the sedimentation coefficient is estimated from a sucrose gradient, calibrated with known proteins. This is apt to give rise to large errors, because in the mixed solvent system, containing water, D2O and sucrose, the composition of the sedimenting particle becomes indeterminate and the masking of the bound detergent by D2O a matter of guesswork.
All the same, the experiments for the course are for the most part imaginatively chosen and clearly explained, and there is evidence that for once a group of editors has done more than collect up the manuscripts, stack them neatly and parcel them off to the printers. Of course, as with anything of a culinary nature, the test of merit will have to be whether or not the sauces curdle and the soufflés collapse when one follows the instructions. You may well be lucky and find here exactly the recipe you happen to need; but I would guess that this book will come into its own as an aid for harassed lecturers and demonstrators seeking (as members of the profession will) to minimize the erosion of their valuable research time by the tiresome demands of student practicals.
Dr Gratzer is a member of the MRC Cell Biophysics Unit, King’s College, London
