This monograph reviews and summarizes the substantial body of work that has been published on the transcription by polymerase III over the past 5 years. Progress in this field has been very rapid since 1993, and this new edition incorporates all the recent developments and offers the reader a highly detailed analysis of the current state of research on this largest and most complex of the eukaryotic RNA polymerases.

This is an authoritative book that acts as a guide to understanding maize kernel development. Written by a team of experts, it covers topics spanning pre- and post-fertilization events, embryo and endosperm development, grain filling and maturation, and factors influencing crop yield. It explores the significance of maize and other cereal grains, existing hypotheses and research, and important gaps in our knowledge and how we might fill them. This is a valuable resource for researchers of maize and other cereals, and anyone working on basic or applied science in the fields of seed development, plant genetics, and crop physiology.

In the quest to understand and model the healthy or sick human body, re searchers and medical doctors are utilizing more and more quantitative tools and techniques. This trend is pushing the envelope of a new field we call Biomedical Computing, as an exciting frontier among signal processing, pattern recognition, optimization, nonlinear dynamics, computer science and biology, chemistry and medicine. A conference on Biocomputing was held during February 25-27, 2001 at the University of Florida. The conference was sponsored by the Center for Applied Optimization, the Computational Neuroengineering Center, the Biomedical En gineering Program (through a Whitaker Foundation grant), the Brain Institute, the School of Engineering, and the University of Florida Research & Graduate Programs. The conference provided a forum for researchers to discuss and present new directions in Biocomputing. The well-attended three days event was highlighted by the presence of top researchers in the field who presented their work in Biocomputing. This volume contains a selective collection of ref ereed papers based on talks presented at this conference. You will find seminal contributions in genomics, global optimization, computational neuroscience, FMRI, brain dynamics, epileptic seizure prediction and cancer diagnostics. We would like to take the opportunity to thank the sponsors, the authors of the papers, the anonymous referees, and Kluwer Academic Publishers for making the conference successful and the publication of this volume possible. Panos M. Pardalos and Jose C.

The genomic revolution has opened up systematic investigations and engineering designs for various life forms. Systems biology and synthetic biology are emerging as two complementary approaches, which embody the breakthrough in biology and invite application of engineering principles. Systems Biology and Synthetic Biology emphasizes the similarity between biology and engineering at the system level, which is important for applying systems and engineering theories to biology problems. This book demonstrates to students, researchers, and industry that systems biology relies on synthetic biology technologies to study biological systems, while synthetic biology depends on knowledge obtained from systems biology approaches.

This book provides a review of the multitude of nucleic acid polymerases, including DNA and RNA polymerases from Archea, Bacteria and Eukaryota, mitochondrial and viral polymerases, and other specialized polymerases such as telomerase, template-independent terminal nucleotidyl transferase and RNA self-replication ribozyme. Although many books cover several different types of polymerases, no book so far has attempted to catalog all nucleic acid polymerases. The goal of this book is to be the top reference work for postgraduate students, postdocs, and principle investigators who study polymerases of all varieties. In other words, this book is for polymerase fans by polymerase fans. Nucleic acid polymerases play a fundamental role in genome replication, maintenance, gene expression and regulation. Throughout evolution these enzymes have been pivotal in transforming life towards RNA self-replicating systems as well as into more stable DNA genomes. These enzymes are generally extremely efficient and accurate in RNA transcription and DNA replication and share common kinetic and structural features. How catalysis can be so amazingly fast without loss of specificity is a question that has intrigued researchers for over 60 years. Certain specialized polymerases that play a critical role in cellular metabolism are used for diverse biotechnological applications and are therefore an essential tool for research.

New textbooks at all levels of chemistry appear with great regularity. Some fields like basic biochemistry, organic reaction mechanisms, and chemical ther modynamics are well represented by many excellent texts, and new or revised editions are published sufficiently often to keep up with progress in research. However, some areas of chemistry, especially many of those taught at the grad uate level, suffer from a real lack of up-to-date textbooks. The most serious needs occur in fields that are rapidly changing. Textbooks in these subjects usually have to be written by scientists actually involved in the research which is advancing the field. It is not often easy to persuade such individuals to set time aside to help spread the knowledge they have accumulated. Our goal, in this series, is to pinpoint areas of chemistry where recent progress has outpaced what is covered in any available textbooks, and then seek out and persuade experts in these fields to produce relatively concise but instructive introductions to their fields. These should serve the needs of one semester or one quarter graduate courses in chemistry and biochemistry. In some cases the availability of texts in active research areas should help stimulate the creation of new courses. CHARLES R. CANTOR New York Preface This monograph is based on a review on polynucleotide structures written for a book series in 1976.