Current Topics in Membranes is targeted toward scientists and researchers in biochemistry and molecular and cellular biology, providing the necessary membrane research to assist them in discovering the current state of a particular field and in learning where that field is heading. This volume presents an up to date presentation of current knowledge and problems in the field of thermal receptors. This is a rapidly evolving research area and the book contains important contributions from some of the leaders in the field.

This volume is an up-to-date overview of the physiology of selected pathogenic bacteria. Each chapter is written by experts in the field of that organism.The focus is on biochemistry and physiology but topics of clinical relevance are included.

"Experiments in the Purification and Characterization of Enzymes: A Laboratory Manual" provides students with a working knowledge of the fundamental and advanced techniques of experimental biochemistry. Included are instructions and experiments that involve purification and characterization of enzymes from various source materials, giving students excellent experience in kinetics analysis and data analysis. Additionally, this lab manual covers how to evaluate and effectively use scientific data. By focusing on the relationship between structure and function in enzymes, "Experiments in the Purification and Characterization of Enzymes: A Laboratory Manual" provides a strong research foundation for students enrolled in a biochemistry lab course by outlining how to evaluate and effectively use scientific data in addition to offering students a more hands-on approach with exercises that encourage them to think deeply about the content and to design their own experiments. Instructors will find this book useful because the modular nature of the lab exercises allows them to apply the exercises to any set of proteins and incorporate the exercises into their courses as they see fit, allowing for greater flexibility in the use of the material.

Written in a logical, easy-to-understand manner, "Experiments in the Purification and Characterization of Enzymes: A Laboratory Manual" is an indispensable resource for both students and instructors in the fields of biochemistry, molecular biology, chemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry, and related molecular life sciences such as cell biology, neurosciences, and genetics.
Offers project lab formats for students that closely simulate original research projects
Provides instructional guidance for students to design their own experiments
Includes advanced analytical techniques
Contains adaptable modular exercises that allow for the study proteins other than FNR, LuxG and LDH.
Includes access to a website with additional resources for instructors."

"Current Topics in Membranes "is targeted toward scientists and researchers in biochemistry and molecular and cellular biology, providing the necessary membrane research to assist them in understanding the current state and future prospects of a particular field.

This volume on exchangers, in conjunction with a previous volume on cotransporters (volume 70), represents an up-to-date, systematic, and comprehensive review of all the major secondary active carrier proteins responsible for the absorption, secretion, and general transport of ions and solutes in mammalian organ systems and additional species. Each chapter is devoted to a specific transporter or a grouping of related transporters based on the well-recognized nomenclature of the SoLute Carrier (SLC) gene family. This book provides readers with the latest mechanistic information on the function and structure of specific transporters, as well as their history and physiological significance.
Comprehensive review of all the major exchangers Emphasis on protein mechanism with the most recent findings from functional and structural workAuthoritative work from experts in the field

Written in the same engaging conversational style as the acclaimed first edition, Primer to The Immune Response, 2ndEdition is a fully updated and invaluable resource for college and university students in life sciences, medicine and other health professions who need a concise but comprehensive introduction to immunology. The authors bring clarity and readability to their audience, offering a complete survey of the most fundamental concepts in basic and clinical immunology while conveying the subject s fascinating appeal.

The content of this new edition has been completely updated to include current information on all aspects of basic and clinical immunology. The superbly drawn figures are now in full color, complemented by full color plates throughout the book. The text is further enhanced by the inclusion of numerous tables, special topic boxes and brief notes that provide interesting insights. At the end of each chapter, a self-test quiz allows students to monitor their mastery of major concepts, while a set of conceptual questions prompts them to extrapolate further and extend their critical thinking. Moreover, as part of the Academic Cell line of textbooks, Primer to The Immune Response, 2nd Edition contains research passages that shine a spotlight on current experimental work reported in Cell Press articles. These articles also form the basis of case studies that are found in the associated online study guide and are designed to reinforce clinical connections.
Complete yet concise coverage of the basic and clinical principles of immunologyEngaging conversational writing style that is to the point and very readableOver 200 clear, elegant color illustrationsComprehensive glossary and list of abbreviations"

This volume guides readers through the field of systems medicine by defining the terminology, and describing how established computational methods form bioinformatics and systems biology can be taken forward to an integrative systems medicine approach. Chapters provide an outlook on the role that systems medicine may or should play in various medical fields, and describe different facets of the systems medicine approach in action. Ultimately it introduces tools, resources and methodologies from bioinformatics and systems biology, and how to apply these in a systems medicine project. Written for the Methods in Molecular Biology series, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, and discuss experimental and computational approaches, methods, and tools that should be considered for a successful systems medicine project. Systems Medicine aims to motivate and provide guidance for collaborations across disciplines to tackle today's challenges related to human health and well-being.

This volume provides leading-edge protocols in the study of the molecular and cellular biology of muscle stem cells. Chapters detail current and updated methods for muscle stem cell isolation, culture, molecular analysis, cellular analysis, and reintroduction in vivo as well as protocols for studying myogenic stem cells in non-mammalian model systems. Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Authoritative and cutting-edge, Muscle Stem Cells: Methods and Protocols aims to ensure successful results in the further study of this vital field.

Targeted toward researchers in biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, pharmacology, and cancer, this is thesecond part of "The Enzymes"' volumes that discuss inhibitors of the Ras superfamily G-proteins.

Key features:

* Contributions from leading authorities

* Informs and updates on all the latest developments in the field "

This book presents an overview of the RNA networks controlling gene expression in fungi highlighting the remaining questions and future challenges in this area.

It covers several aspects of the RNA-mediated mechanisms that regulate gene expression in model yeasts and filamentous fungi, organisms of great importance for industry, medicine and agriculture. It is estimated that there are more than one million fungal species on the Earth. Despite their diversity (saprophytic, parasitic and mutualistic), fungi share common features distinctive from plants and animals and have been grouped taxonomically as an independent eukaryotic kingdom. In this book, 15 chapters written by experts in their fields cover the RNA-dependent processes that take place in a fungal cell ranging from formation of coding and non-coding RNAs to mRNA translation, ribosomal RNA biogenesis, gene silencing, RNA editing and epigenetic regulation.

This new edition of "Innovations in Food Packaging" ensures that readers have the most current information on food packaging options, including active packaging, intelligent packaging, edible/biodegradable packaging, nanocomposites and other options for package design.

Today's packaging not only contains and protects food, but where possible and appropriate, it can assist in inventory control, consumer education, increased market availability and shelf life, and even in ensuring the safety of the food product. As nanotechnology and other technologies have developed, new and important options for maximizing the role of packaging have emerged.

This book specifically examines the whole range of modern packaging options. It covers edible packaging based on carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids, antioxidative and antimicrobial packaging, and chemistry issues of food and food packaging, such as plasticization and polymer morphology. Professionals involved in food safety and shelf life, as well as researchers and students of food science, will find great value in this complete and updated overview.

New to this edition: Over 60% updated content - including nine completely new chapters - with the latest developments in technology, processes and materialsNow includes bioplastics, biopolymers, nanoparticles, and eco-design of packaging

The papers in this volume represent a broad, applied swath of advanced contributions to the 2015 ICSA/Graybill Applied Statistics Symposium of the International Chinese Statistical Association, held at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. The contributions cover topics that range from statistical applications in business and finance to applications in clinical trials and biomarker analysis. Each papers was peer-reviewed by at least two referees and also by an editor. The conference was attended by over 400 participants from academia, industry, and government agencies around the world, including from North America, Asia, and Europe.

With an emphasis on applications of computational models for solving modern challenging problems in biomedical and life sciences, this book aims to bring collections of articles from biologists, medical/biomedical and health science researchers together with computational scientists to focus on problems at the frontier of biomedical and life sciences. The goals of this book are to build interactions of scientists across several disciplines and to help industrial users apply advanced computational techniques for solving practical biomedical and life science problems. This book is for users in the fields of biomedical and life sciences who wish to keep abreast with the latest techniques in signal and image analysis. The book presents a detailed description to each of the applications. It can be used by those both at graduate and specialist levels.

These papers on Intelligent Data Analysis and Management (IDAM) examine issues related to the research and applications of Artificial Intelligence techniques in data analysis and management across a variety of disciplines. The papers derive from the 2013 IDAM conference in Kaohsiung ,Taiwan. It is an interdisciplinary research field involving academic researchers in information technologies, computer science, public policy, bioinformatics, medical informatics, and social and behavior studies, etc. The techniques studied include (but are not limited to): data visualization, data pre-processing, data engineering, database mining techniques, tools and applications, evolutionary algorithms, machine learning, neural nets, fuzzy logic, statistical pattern recognition, knowledge filtering, and post-processing, etc.

This volume details several important databases and data mining tools. Data Mining Techniques for the Life Sciences, Second Edition guides readers through archives of macromolecular three-dimensional structures, databases of protein-protein interactions, thermodynamics information on protein and mutant stability, "Kbdock" protein domain structure database, PDB_REDO databank, erroneous sequences, substitution matrices, tools to align RNA sequences, interesting procedures for kinase family/subfamily classifications, new tools to predict protein crystallizability, metabolomics data, drug-target interaction predictions, and a recipe for protein-sequence-based function prediction and its implementation in the latest version of the ANNOTATOR software suite. Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Authoritative and cutting-edge, Data Mining Techniques for the Life Sciences, Second Edition aims to ensure successful results in the further study of this vital field.

The work described in this book is an excellent example of interdisciplinary research in systems biology. It shows how concepts and approaches from the field of physics can be efficiently used to answer biological questions and reports on a novel methodology involving creative computer-based analyses of high-throughput biological data. Many of the findings described in the book, which are the result of collaborations between the author (a theoretical scientist) and experimental biologists and between different laboratories, have been published in high-quality peer-reviewed journals such as Molecular Cell and Nature. However, while those publications address different aspects of post-transcriptional gene regulation, this book provides readers with a complete, coherent and logical view of the research project as a whole. The introduction presents post-transcriptional gene regulation from a distinct angle, highlighting aspects of information theory and evolution and laying the groundwork for the questions addressed in the subsequent chapters, which concern the regulation of the transcriptome as the primary functional carrier of active genetic information.

This book contributes to better understand how lifestyle modulations can effectively halt the emergence and progression of human diseases. The book will allow the reader to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms by which the environment interferes with the bio-molecular regulatory processes underlying the emergence and progression of complex diseases, such as cancer. Focusing on key and early cellular bio-molecular events giving rise to the emergence of degenerative chronic disease, it builds on previous experience on the development of multi-cellular organisms, to propose a mathematical and computer based framework that allows the reader to analyze the complex interplay between bio-molecular processes and the (micro)-environment from an integrative, mechanistic, quantitative and dynamical perspective. Taking the wealth of empirical evidence that exists it will show how to build and analyze models of core regulatory networks involved in the emergence and progression of chronic degenerative diseases, using a bottom-up approach.

This book is concerned with recent advances in fitness landscapes. The concept of fitness landscapes originates from theoretical biology and refers to a framework for analysing and visualizing the relationships between genotypes, phenotypes and fitness. These relationships lay at the centre of attempts to mathematically describe evolutionary processes and evolutionary dynamics.

The book addresses recent advances in the understanding of fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology and evolutionary computation. In the volume, experts in the field of fitness landscapes present these findings in an integrated way to make it accessible to a number of audiences: senior undergraduate and graduate students in computer science, theoretical biology, physics, applied mathematics and engineering, but also researcher looking for a reference or/and entry point into using fitness landscapes for analysing algorithms. Also practitioners wanting to employ fitness landscape techniques for evaluating bio- and nature-inspired computing algorithms can find valuable material in the book. For teaching proposes, the book could also be used as a reference handbook.

This book presents an overview of a variety of contemporary statistical, mathematical and computer science techniques which are used to further the knowledge in the medical domain. The authors focus on applying data mining to the medical domain, including mining the sets of clinical data typically found in patient's medical records, image mining, medical mining, data mining and machine learning applied to generic genomic data and more. This work also introduces modeling behavior of cancer cells, multi-scale computational models and simulations of blood flow through vessels by using patient-specific models. The authors cover different imaging techniques used to generate patient-specific models. This is used in computational fluid dynamics software to analyze fluid flow. Case studies are provided at the end of each chapter. Professionals and researchers with quantitative backgrounds will find Computational Medicine in Data Mining and Modeling useful as a reference. Advanced-level students studying computer science, mathematics, statistics and biomedicine will also find this book valuable as a reference or secondary text book.

The first edition of "Geometric Morphometrics for Biologists" has been the primary resource for teaching modern geometric methods of shape analysis to biologists who have a stronger background in biology than in multivariate statistics and matrix algebra. These geometric methods are appealing to biologists who approach the study of shape from a variety of perspectives, from clinical to evolutionary, because they incorporate the geometry of organisms throughout the data analysis. The second edition of this book retains the emphasis on accessible explanations, and the copious illustrations and examples of the first, updating the treatment of both theory and practice. The second edition represents the current state-of-the-art and adds new examples and summarizes recent literature, as well as provides an overview of new software and step-by-step guidance through details of carrying out the analyses.
Contains updated coverage of methods, especially for sampling complex curves and 3D forms and a new chapter on applications of geometric morphometrics to forensicsOffers a reorganization of chapters to streamline learning basic conceptsPresents detailed instructions for conducting analyses with freely available, easy to use software Provides numerous illustrations, including graphical presentations of important theoretical concepts and demonstrations of alternative approaches to presenting results

This book contains some selected papers from the International Conference on Extreme Learning Machine 2015, which was held in Hangzhou, China, December 15-17, 2015. This conference brought together researchers and engineers to share and exchange R&D experience on both theoretical studies and practical applications of the Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) technique and brain learning. This book covers theories, algorithms ad applications of ELM. It gives readers a glance of the most recent advances of ELM.

The application of methodological approaches and mathematical formalisms proper to Physics and Engineering to investigate and describe biological processes and design biological structures has led to the development of many disciplines in the context of computational biology and biotechnology. The best known applicative domain is tissue engineering and its branches. Recent domains of interest are in the field of biophysics, e.g.: multiscale mechanics of biological membranes and films and filaments; multiscale mechanics of adhesion; biomolecular motors and force generation.

Modern hypotheses, models, and tools are currently emerging and resulting from the convergence of the methods and phylosophycal apporaches of the different research areas and disciplines. All these emerging approaches share the purpose of disentangling the complexity of organisms, tissues, and cells and mimiking the function of living systems.

The contributions presented in this book are current research highlights of six challenging and representative applicative domains of phyisical, engineering, and computational approaches in medicine and biology, i.e tissue engineering, modelling of molecular structures, cell mechanics and cell adhesion processes, cancer physics, and physico-chemical processes of metabolic interactions. Each chapter presents a compendium or a review of the original results achieved by authors in the last years. Furthermore, the book also wants to pinpoint the questions that are still open and that could propel the future research.

The contributors to this volume include many of the distinguished researchers in this area. Many of these scholars have collaborated with Joseph McKean to develop underlying theory for these methods, obtain small sample corrections, and develop efficient algorithms for their computation. The papers cover the scope of the area, including robust nonparametric rank-based procedures through Bayesian and big data rank-based analyses. Areas of application include biostatistics and spatial areas. Over the last 30 years, robust rank-based and nonparametric methods have developed considerably. These procedures generalize traditional Wilcoxon-type methods for one- and two-sample location problems. Research into these procedures has culminated in complete analyses for many of the models used in practice including linear, generalized linear, mixed, and nonlinear models. Settings are both multivariate and univariate. With the development of R packages in these areas, computation of these procedures is easily shared with readers and implemented. This book is developed from the International Conference on Robust Rank-Based and Nonparametric Methods, held at Western Michigan University in April 2015.

This volume reviews the current metabolic engineering tools and technologies from a practical point of view, and guides researchers as they overcome challenges at various stages of organism and bioprocess development. Microbes have been engineered to produce a variety of industrial products such as fuels, basic chemicals, fine chemicals, nutritional supplements, and pharmaceutical intermediates, and new tools such as gene synthesis, advanced cloning techniques, 'omics' analysis, and mathematical modeling have greatly accelerated the pace of innovation in the field. Written by leading experts in the field from both academia and industry, key topics include synthetic biology, pathway engineering, metabolic flux manipulation, adaptive evolution, and fermentation process scale-up. It is suitable for non-specialists, and is a valuable resource for anyone embarking on the exciting path to harnessing the metabolic potential of microorganisms.