The study of biochemical adaption provides fascinating insights into how organisms "work" and how they evolve to sustain physiological function under a vast array of environmental conditions. This book describes how the abilities of organisms to thrive in widely different environments derive from two fundamental classes of biochemical adaptions: modifications of core biochemical processes that allow a common set of physiological functions to be conserved, and "inventions" of new biochemical traits that allow entry into novel habitats. Biochemical Adaptation: Mechanisms and Process in Physiological Evolution asks two primary questions. First, how have the core biochemical systems found in all species been adaptively modified to allow the same fundamental types of physiological processes to be sustained throughout the wide range of habitat conditions found in the biosphere? Second, through what types of genetic and biochemical processes have new physiological functions been fabricated? The primary audience for this book is faculty, senior undergraduates, and graduate students in environmental biology, comparative physiology, and marine biology. Other likely readers include workers in governmental laboratories concerned with environmental issues, medical students interested in some elements of the book, and medical researchers.

The abiotic characteristics of the environment—including temperature, oxygen availability, salinity, and hydrostatic pressure—present challenges to all biochemical structures and processes. This volume first examines the nature of these perturbations to biochemical systems and then elucidates the major adaptive strategies that enable organisms from all Domains of Life—Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya—to conserve common types of biochemical structures and processes across a wide range of environments. In addition to these conservative adaptations that foster a biochemical unity among diverse species, other adaptations can be viewed as innovative changes that enable organisms to exploit new features of the environment that may themselves be the result of biological activities.

This book discusses biochemical adaptation to environments from freezing polar oceans to boiling hot springs, and under hydrostatic pressures up to 1,000 times that at sea level. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In their very first lecture biochemists learn that biomolecules, namely nucleic acids, proteins and lipids, are extremely temperature sensitive and will denature and lose their function easily. Then how do Archaebacteria survive in hot springs or Antarctic fishes which live in ice-cold water? The way nature engineered subcellular structures, lipid membranes or proteins to meet the biochemical requirements of extreme conditions - like extreme temperature or salt concentrations - is described in Life Under Extreme Conditions.

This book attempts to place what is known about the biochemistry of parasites in a biological context covering evolution, ecology, adaptation and variation. In addition there is a chapter on parasite immunology.