Pulmonary Biology in Health and Disease was conceived as a companion to a handful of expensive, multivolume textbooks. This is part of the promising trend to publish shorter textbooks on the subjects of lung biology and remodeling. Whoever is familiar with human biology and the far-reaching consequences of the genome and postgenome revolutions is apt to concede that the centerpiece in remodeling lies in the ?eld of m- ecular cardiobiology. The ?eld of molecular cardiobiology includes the syndrome of chronic heart failure as well as ischemic cardioprotection. By analogy, the centerpiece in pulmonobiology is chronic asthma. Key topics in the present volume include s- naling mechanisms regulating the endothelium and smooth muscle cells,in?ammatory cells, mediators, airway surface liquid, and pharmacological therapy that focuses on how in?amed airways are altered. Written primarily for predoctoral and postdoctoral graduates in the basic medical sciences, the medical student and postdoctoral physician, graduates in the allied s- ences, nurses, pulmonologists, and physicians in critical care medicine, this book p- vides many of the fundamentals of contemporary pulmonology. It is divided into several parts devoted to the control of respiration, arterial chemoreceptors,muscles of ventilation, pulmonary physiology, and gas exchange in health, exercise, and disease. Special emphasis is placed on emphysema and its pathobiology, acute lung injury, asthma and inhaled toxicants. Because the ?eld is always evolving, each chapter includes recommended readings that lead the reader to sources of additional information, such as the review on remodeling of the blood gas barrier by West and Mathieu-Costello.

This book contains aseries of review papers related to the lectures given at the Third Course on Bioelectrochemistry held at Erice in November 1988, in the framework of the International School of Biophysics. The topics covered by this course, "Charge Separation Across Biomembranes, " deal with the electrochemical aspects of some basic phenomena in biological systems, such as transport of ions, ATP synthesis, formation and maintenance of ionic and protonic gradients. In the first part of the course some preliminary lectures introduce the students to the most basic phenomena and technical aspects of membrane bioelectrochemistry. The remaining part of the course is devoted to the description of a selected group of membrane-enzyme systems, capable of promoting, or exploiting, the processes of separation of electrically charged entities (electrons or ions) across the membrane barrier. These systems are systematically discussed both from a structural and functional point of view. The effort of the many distinguished lecturers who contributed to the course is aimed at offering a unifying treatement of the electrogenic systems operating in biological membranes, underlying the fundamental differences in the molecular mechanisms of charge translocation.

Once Nietzsche said that human beings may be divided into two categories: Apollonians and Dionysians*. By this the philosopher meant that there are human beings a) who know what they are going to do in the long-term future (what we now call the grant application for the next 5 years), i. e. , Apollonians, and b) who barely know what they are going to do tomorrow morning before breakfast, i. e. , Dionysians. ** To organize a symposium, this symposium in particular, a committee had to be formed either of individuals sharing both Nietzschean characteristics or of individuals possessing either characteristic. Considering the rarity of the former type of subject, this organizing committee was spontaneously formed by a typical sample of both types of individuals. We first met in Perugia in 1988. Those of us who were Apollonians had thus a chance to organize a programme. The Dionysians knew what was going to happen to them, but, of course, did not know yet how to cope with it. They duly did so every day of the meeting, after breakfast. The organizers decided that it would be a useful exercise to assemble experts having different perspectives but all pursuing a very rapidly developing aspect of cell biology. They also hoped that these selected Apollonians and Dionysians would not merely recount their results but try to project the future through active interchanges of ideas and opinions with other attendees.

Various endogenous and environmental challenges of homoiostasis have resulted in the evolution of apparently quite different mechanisms for the same or similar functions in individual representatives of the animal kingdom. One of the prominent achievements of comparative physiology over the last few decades has been the description of regula- tory features common to many studied species beyond the extreme diversity of their morphological forms. Delineation offunctional princi- ples universally applicable to the physiology and biochemistry of living systems became often possible through technical advances in the devel- opment of numerous new techniques, in many cases modified and adopted from other fields of science, but also by approaching certain problems using multifactorial analysis. The advance in technology has facilitated studies of minute functional details of mechanisms, which finally lead to better understanding of generally similar functions, covered by the multiple developments of Nature as a response to an extreme variety of different conditions. Improved understanding of specific mechanisms, however, has presented new problems at the level of system integration. The importance of the integrative aspect became particularly apparent during an international symposium on 'Mecha- nisms of Systemic Regulation in Lower Vertebrates: Respiration, Circu- lation, Ion Transfer and Metabolism' (organized in 1990 by Norbert Heisler and Johannes Piiper at the Max-Planck-Institut fUr experimen- telle Medizin at Gottingen/Germany).

In the first edition of The Enzymes of Biological Membranes, published in four volumes in 1976, we collected the mass of widely scattered information on membrane-linked enzymes and metabolic processes up to about 1975. This was a period of transition from the romantic phase of membrane biochemistry, preoccupied with conceptual developments and the general properties of membranes, to an era of mounting interest in the specific properties of membrane-linked enzymes analyzed from the viewpoints of modem enzymology. The level of sophistication in various areas of membrane research varied widely; the structures of cytochrome c and cytochrome b5 were known to atomic detail, while the majority of membrane-linked enzymes had not even been isolated. In the intervening eight years our knowledge of membrane-linked enzymes ex panded beyond the wildest expectations. The purpose of the second edition of The Enzymes of Biological Membranes is to record these developments. The first volume describes the physical and chemical techniques used in the analysis of the structure and dynamics of biological membranes. In the second volume the enzymes and met abolic systems that participate in the biosynthesis of cell and membrane components are discussed. The third and fourth volumes review recent developments in active transport, oxidative phosphorylation and photosynthesis."

This comprehensive treatise on the reticuloendothelial system is a project jointly shared by individual members of the Reticuloendothelial (RE) Society and bio medical scientists in general who are interested in the intricate system of cells and molecular moieties derived from those cells which constitute the RES. It may now be more fashionable in some quarters to consider these cells as part of what is called the mononuclear phagocytic system or the lymphoreticular sys tem. Nevertheless, because of historical developments and current interest in the subject by investigators from many diverse areas, it seems advantageous to present in one comprehensive treatise current information and knowledge con cerning basic aspects of the RES, such as morphology, biochemistry, phylogeny and ontogeny, physiology, and pharmacology as well as clinical areas including immunopathology, cancer, infectious diseases, allergy, and hypersensitivity. It is anticipated that, by presenting information concerning these apparently het erogeneous topics under the unifying umbrella of the RES, attention will be focused on the similarities as well as interactions among the cell types constitut ing the RES from the viewpoint of various disciplines. The treatise editors and their editorial board, consisting predominantly of the editors of individual vol and enormous task umes, are extremely grateful for the enthusiastic cooperation undertaken by members of the biomedical community in general and especially and Japanese Reticuloen by members of the American as well as European dothelial Societies.

The dream of developing a biocomputer should not be dismissed as a sheer fantasy. Although there is naturally some doubt as to whether it is possible to design a computer using carbon-based components as in living organisms, instead of silicon-based components as in existing computers, the fact that an average brain often outperforms the most sophisticated computer in terms of the complexity of tasks, if not in terms of speed, is a living testimony to this possibility. The remaining question is to what extent a biocomputer can mimic a living organism and whether it is possible to design and fabri cate such a biocomputer within the foreseeable future. This volume does not attempt to provide immediate and exact answers to these questions but instead attempts to provide a vision and a progress report of the initial efforts. This volume is mainly a collection of papers presented at the Symposium on Molecular Electronics - Biosensors and Biocomputers, sponsored by the Divi sion of Biotechnology, Health and Environment of the Fine Particle Society, held from July 19-22, 1989 at the Society's 19th Annual Meeting in Santa Clara, California. Also included are articles contributed by those who planned to attend the conference but were unable to do so. The emergence of the field of molecular electronics is largely the consequence of one person's crusade, that of Forrest L. Carter.

Throughout the 1950s, methods of experimental analysis led to a great increase in knowledge of the machinery of insect flight. In this 1957 monograph, Dr Pringle brings together the results of his investigations of the mechanics of wing motion, the structure and physiology of flight muscle, aerodynamics, sense organs and nervous co-ordination, and shows how a common structural plan has been perfected during the course of evolution to produce the variety of form and function found in the different insect orders. Of particular interest is the special type of muscle found only in the higher insects and responsible for the very high wing-beat frequencies of some flies and bees. Many different lines of approach have contributed to the understanding of insect flight, and the subject is of great interest to entomologists, comparative physiologists and biological engineers.

Environmental conditions change considerably in the course of 24 h with respect to abiotic factors and intra- and interspecific interactions. These changes result in limited time windows of opportunity for animal activities and, hence, the question of when to do what is subject to fitness maximisation. This volume gives a current overview of theoretical considerations and empirical findings of activity patterns in small mammals, a group in which the energetic and ecological constraints are particularly severe and the diversity of activity patterns is particularly high. Following a comparative ecological approach, for the first time activity timing is consequently treated in terms of behavioural and evolutionary ecology, providing the conceptual framework for chronoecology as a new subdiscipline within behavioural ecology. An extensive Appendix gives an introduction to methods of activity modelling and to tools for statistical pattern analysis.

(Chapters 11 to 14) summarise important features of the biological clock at the level of whole animal covering all vertebrate classes (fish to mammal). Chapters 15 and 16 are on long term (seasonal) rhythms in plants and higher vertebrates. Short term rhythms (ultradian rhythms), the significance of having a clock system in animals living in extreme (arctic) environments, and the diversity of circadian responses to melatonin, the key endocrine element involved in regulation of biological rhythms, have been discussed in Chapters 17 to 19. Finally, a chapter on sensitivity to light of the photoperiodic clock is added which, using vertebrate examples, illustrates the importance of wavelength and intensity of light on circadian and non-circadian functions. A well-known expert writes each chapter. When presenting information, the text provides consistent thematic coverage and feeling for the methods of investigation. Reference citation within the body of the text adequately reflects the literature as subject is developed. A chapter begins with an abstract that enables a reader to know at the first glance the important points covered in that chapter. The chapter concludes with a full citation of references included in the text, which could be useful for further reading. The book ends with a comprehensive subject index that may be useful for quick searches.

The basal forebrain has received considerable attention in recent years. This emphasis resulted from observations that the cortically projecting cholinergic neurons found in this region are critical for normal information processing. However, to achieve a complete understanding of such a complex function as "information processing" it is necessary to consider the basal forebrain not as an autonomous structure with a solitary task, but one that plays an integrative role; a structure that is connected intimately with many brain regions. This view evolved from the realization that the basal forebrain interfaces cognitive and reward functions with motor outputs. It is from this integrative and functional perspective that the present book was organized. The book is a unique collection of reports pertaining to the basal forebrain that encompasses a diversity of research approaches and techniques. It provides the reader with a progression of information that begins with anatomical descriptions of the afferent and efferent systems, stressing the integrative nature of various neurotransmitters located within the basal forebrain. The chapters focusing on anatomy are complemented by electrophysiologic studies that merge anatomical concepts with synaptic pharmacology and behavior. In vitro experiments demonstrate physiologic variations in anatomically identified neuronal subtypes and, together with in vivo techniques, provide pharmacologic descriptions of neuronal consequences to various neurotransmitter influences. Additional in vivo reports correlate changes in neuronal activity with specific motivational states and motor behaviors. These functional approaches culminate with behavioral studies that overview current understanding of basal forebrain involvement in mnemonic, reward, and motor processes.

The Intemational Meeting on Vitamin B6 and Carbonyl Catalysis took place on Capri, Italy from 22nd to 27th May 1994 and was organized in conjunction with the 3rd Symposium on PQQ and Quinoproteins. It was an extraordinary occasion for scientists from all over the world to meet and discuss new developments in these overlapping fields. Several sessions were dedicated to the molecular aspects of Vitamin B6 and Quinone dependent enzymes, as well as to the cellular, biomedical and nutritional aspects. The congress was inaugurated by Paolo Fasella in his capacity as General Director of Science, Research and Development of the Commission of the European Communities, with an overview on Intemational Scientific Collaboration. The scientific sessions started with a talk on the History of Vitamin B6 given by David Metzler who at the very last minute presented Esmond Snell's paper adding some personal remarks. Unfortunately, both Esmond Snell and Alton Meister had to unexpectedly cancel the trip to Capri. These proceedings contain the papers presented as oral contributions and a few selected poster presentations. The limited number of pages meant we could not publish many interesting poster presentations, including those selected for the three lively and exciting evening poster discussion sessions called by the organizers "Vino, taralli and ... discussion".

The fundamental understanding of the production of biological effects by ionizing radiation may well be one of the most important scientific objectives of mankind; such understanding could lead to the effective and safe utilization of the nuclear energy option. In addition, this knowledge will be of immense value in such diverse fields as radiation therapy and diagnosis and in the space program. To achieve the above stated objective, the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) and its predecessors embarked upon a fundamental interdisciplinary research program some 35 years ago. A critical component of this program is the Radiological and Chemical Physics Program (RCPP). When the RCPP was established, there was very little basic knowledge in the fields of physics, chemistry, and biology that could be directly applied to understanding the effects of radiation on biological systems. Progress of the RCPP program in its first 15 years was documented in the proceedings of a conference held at Airlie, Virginia, in 1972. At this conference, it was clear that considerable progr:ess had been made in research on the physical and chemical processes in well-characterized systems that could be used to understand biological effects. During this period of time, most physical knowledge was obtained for the gas phase because the technology and instru mentation had not progressed to the point that measurements could be made in liquids more characteristic of biological materials.

List of Participants 1 Hypoxia-Induced Intermitochondrial Junctions in the Rabbit Carotid-Body : An Ultrastructural and Experimental Study. A. VERNA. N. TALIB and A. BARETS. 11 Ultrastructural Studies of the Cat Carotid Body Perfused for Short Periods with Physiological Saline Solutions. R.G. O'REGAN. M. KENNEDY. D. COTTELL and S. FEELY. Morphological and Biochemical 19 Characteristics of the Laryngeal Nerve paraganglia. A. DAHLQVIST. S. HELLSTROM. B. CARLSOO. J.M. PEGUIGNOT and S. DOMEIJ. 29 Central Terminations of Carotid Body Chemoreceptor Afferents. D. JORDAN. S. DONOGHUE. R.B. FELDER and K.M. SPYER. 39 Vascular Geometry of Arterial Chemoreceptors: Learning about the Caritud Body by Studying paraganglia of the Superior Laryngeal Nerve D. M. McDONALD and AMY HASKELL. Altered Function of Cat Carotid Body 50 Chemoreceptors in Prolonged Hyperoxia. S. LAHIRI. E. MULLIGAN. A. MORASHI. S. ADNRONIKOU and M. SHIRAHATA. 59 Glycolysis as a Link for Chemoreception? MARCO A. DELPIANO. Spectrophotometric Studies on Carotid 69 Body Tissue. H. ACKER. C. EYZAGUIRRE. ATP Content in the Cat Carotid Body 78 under Different Experimental Conditions. Support for the Metabolic Hypothesis. A. onESO. L. AL~ffiRAZ and C. GONZALEZ. 91 pathways for Calcium Entry into Type I Cells: Significance for the Secretory Response. A. OBESO. S. FIDONE and C. GONZALEZ. Effects of Cyanide and Acetylcholine on 99 Extracellular K+ and Ca++ Activities in the Cat Carotid Body. R.G. O'REGAN and H. ACKER. Application of the Chemiluminescent 108 Method to Carotid Body for Detecting Choline and Acetylcholine. ARCADI GUAL and JORDI HARSAL.

How do vertebrates get the oxygen they need, or even manage without it for shorter or longer periods of time? How do they sense oxygen, how do they take it up from water or air, and how do they transport it to their tissues? Respiratory system adaptations allow numerous vertebrates to thrive in extreme environments where oxygen availability is limited or where there is no oxygen at all. Written for students and researchers in comparative physiology, this authoritative summary of vertebrate respiratory physiology begins by exploring the fundamentals of oxygen sensing, uptake and transport in a textbook style. Subsequently, the reader is shown important examples of extreme respiratory performance, like diving and high altitude survival in mammals and birds, air breathing in fish, and those few vertebrates that can survive without any oxygen at all for several months, showing how evolution has solved the problem of life without oxygen.

How do vertebrates get the oxygen they need, or even manage without it for shorter or longer periods of time? How do they sense oxygen, how do they take it up from water or air, and how do they transport it to their tissues? Respiratory system adaptations allow numerous vertebrates to thrive in extreme environments where oxygen availability is limited or where there is no oxygen at all. Written for students and researchers in comparative physiology, this authoritative summary of vertebrate respiratory physiology begins by exploring the fundamentals of oxygen sensing, uptake and transport in a textbook style. Subsequently, the reader is shown important examples of extreme respiratory performance, like diving and high altitude survival in mammals and birds, air breathing in fish, and those few vertebrates that can survive without any oxygen at all for several months, showing how evolution has solved the problem of life without oxygen.

Indonesia possesses the second largest primate population in the world, with over 33 different primate species. Although Brazil possesses more primate species, Indonesia outranks it in terms of its diversity of primates, ranging from prosimians (slow lorises and tarsiers), to a multitude of Old World Monkey species (macaques, langurs, proboscis moneys) to lesser apes (siamangs, gibbons) and great apes (orangutans). The primates of Indonesia are distributed throughout the archipelago. Partly in response to the number of primates distributed throughout the Indonesian archipelago, Indonesia is classified as the home of two biodiversity hotspots (Wallacea and Sundaland). In order to be classified as a hotspot, an area must have a large proportion of endemic species coupled with a high degree of threat including having lost more than 70% of its original habitat. Two areas within Indonesia meet these criteria. The tremendous diversity of primates in Indonesia, in conjunction with the conservation issues facing the primates of this region, created a need for this volume.

Phoridae are probably the insect family with the greatest diversity of larval habits, but the least studied of the large families of flies due to identification difficulties. This book collates what is known about the natural history of the Phoridae world. It reviews eggs and oviposition, larval habits (including saprophages, kleptoparasites, fungus breeders, plant feeders, predator, parasitoids, parasites and enemies), pupae and their enemies, development, adult habits (including feeding, special associations, courtship, mating, phoretic mites and enemies) and ecological aspects. There follows a new user-friendly and extensively illustrated key to world genera and a review of the identification literature for each of the 229 genera recognized. A review of methods and an extensive bibliography complete the work.

There are more than 6000 species belonging to twenty-seven orders in the Class Mammalia. Comparative studies of this diverse and magnificent array of extant species provide valuable opportunities to formulate and test hypotheses concerning the evolution of reproduction. This is the first book to explore, in depth and breadth, the complex interrelationships that exist between patterns of mating behaviour and the evolution of mammalian reproductive anatomy and physiology. It focuses upon the role that copulatory and post-copulatory sexual selection have played during the evolution of the monotremes, marsupials and placental mammals, and examines the effects of sperm competition and cryptic female choice upon coevolution of the genitalia in the two sexes. In addition, due weight is also given to discussions of the modes of life of mammals, and to the roles played by natural selection and phylogeny in determining their reproductive traits.

In March 1996 the Society of Experimental Biology (UK) together with two other international scientific societies, the Australian and New Zealand Society for Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry and the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (formally the American Society for Zoology) joined forces with Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg to produce one of the first fully electronic online, peer-reviewed biological journals, Experimental Biology Online. The present product represents the fruits of this joint venture and encapsulates Volumes 1 and 2 of the journal. This will be an ongoing series such that an archival version of the journal will be available to all libraries as well as the on-line version. At the outset this was "new land" for all concerned but the launching of a journal which would cover experimental biology in terms of Animal, Cell and Plant topics was daunting but we all felt that the use of electronic media and the internet would be ideally suited to this purpose.

In the mid-sixties, John Robson and Christina Enroth-Cugell, without realizing what they were doing, set off a virtual revolution in the study of the visual system. They were trying to apply the methods of linear systems analysis (which were already being used to describe the optics of the eye and the psychophysical performance of the human visual system) to the properties of retinal ganglion cells in the cat. Their idea was to stimulate the retina with patterns of stripes and to look at the way that the signals from the center and the antagonistic surround of the respective field of each ganglion cell (first described by Stephen Kuffier) interact to generate the cell's responses. Many of the ganglion cells behaved themselves very nicely and John and Christina got into the habit (they now say) of calling them I (interesting) cells. However. to their annoyance, the majority of neurons they recorded had nasty, nonlinear properties that couldn't be predicted on the basis of simple summ4tion of light within the center and the surround. These uncoop erative ganglion cells, which Enroth-Cugell and Robson at first called D (dull) cells, produced transient bursts of impulses every time the distribution of light falling on the receptive field was changed, even if the total light flux was unaltered."

Present knowledge of the mechanisms underlying any single sensory modality is so massive as to discourage effort directed towards completeness. The idea underlying the structure of this volume on "Sensory transduction" was to select just a few topics of general interest, which are currently being investigated and for which a reasonably clear picture is now available. During the last five years there has been a revolution in the way sensory physi ologists think about transduction, and a series of exciting advances have been made in understanding the basic processes of photo transduction, chemotransduction and mechan otransduction. It is clear that in many cases the fundamental processes by which nature attains optimization of performance are similar, and that they have much in common with more general processes of signal recognition by living structures. The molecular events underlying the detection of photons by visual cells, the recognition of a given molecule by a chemoreceptor, or the level of a hormone in the extracellular fluid by a target cell, are all very similar, and involve the activation of a sequence of events leading to a secon d messenger. The 20 papers that form the present volume cover various topics in the field of sensory transduction. They originate from the lectures, seminars and discussions which made up the XVIII Course of the International School of Biophysics held in Erice, 9th - 19th June 1988.

Among the different types of receptors for neurotransmitters, nicotinic acetyl choline receptors were the first to be studied systematically; at present they are very well characterized. This is due to the discovery of two very convenient objects that are endowed with nicotinic acetylcholine receptors - the skeletal muscle and the electric organ. The large size of skeletal muscle fibers, which simplifies the intra cellular recording of transmembrane potentials and currents, played a crucial role in obtaining the fIrst quantitative estimates of the activity of acetylcholine receptors and the kinetics of their interaction with ligands. On the other hand, the extremely high content of receptor protein in the electric organ tissue - two orders higher than in muscle tissue - rendered it highly suitable for studying the biochemistry of recep tors. The combination of pharmacological, electrophysiological, and biochemical approaches resulted in rapid progress in the investigation of acetylcholine receptors. Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors are also present in the neurons of autonomic ganglia, in the central nervous system of vertebrates, and in the ganglion neurons of invertebrates. Although each of these three types of receptors has its own pharma cological specificity, some of their properties are common and differ from those in the acetylcholine receptors of skeletal muscle and electric organ. One of these differences is that neuronal nicotinic receptors usually coexist in the same nerve cell with other receptors, e. g., muscarinic, serotoninergic, or peptidergic."