Published in 2014, Protein Deimination in Human Health and Disease was the first book on this novel post-translational modification, in which selected positively-charged arginine amino acids are converted to neutral citrulline amino acids by the peptidyl-arginine deiminase (PAD) family of enzymes. This area of research continues to expand rapidly, necessitating the need for this second edition. Chronicling the latest inflammatory, epigenetic, neurodegenerative, and carcinogenic processes, Protein Deimination in Human Health and Disease, Second Edition, updates the latest advances in deimination research, including new information on PAD enzyme structure and activity, and how PAD knock-out animals are being used to study known and newly-discovered links to various human diseases. The first edition outlined what was known about citrullinated proteins in normal tissues such as skin and hair, as well as in maladies such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA), multiple sclerosis (MS), Alzheimer's disease (AD), glaucoma, peripheral nerve injury, neonatal hypoxic brain damage, and breast cancer. This second edition addresses numerous additional disorders such as diabetes, asthma, traumatic brain injury, inflammatory bowel disease, lupus, bone disease, heart failure, fronto-temporal dementia, and prostate and colon cancer. It also provides updates on the deimination research covering the three seminal diseases first linked to this process (RA, MS and AD), and details how auto-antibodies against citrullinated proteins contribute to disease. In addition, new hypotheses on the possible pathologic mechanisms of citrullinated myelin basic protein and glial fibrillary acidic protein are also proposed. This second edition also outlines the latest developments in therapeutic strategies, including the use of new PAD antagonists and innovative techniques such as micro-vescicles and stem cells as possible mechanisms to treat these conditions.

Titanic. The Marilyn Monroe of ocean liners. A sleek, sultry beauty, taken out way before her time. A kind of 21st century Flying Dutchman, with interiors by Cesar Ritz, still striving to achieve the waters of a port she can never reach. Fuelled by a subtle mixture of horror, fascination and sheer, fatal glamour, she surges heedlessly across the still, starlit calm of our collective subconscious, hell bent on achieving her chilling, near midnight rendezvous with her killer. Titanic is a brilliantly lit stage, carrying her cast of exotic, terminally endangered extras toward an abyss at once both unfathomable and inconceivable. Here's where any similarity with any other tome about the Titanic ends. For the first time ever, a succession of key characters and groups of individuals come to the fore. Centre stage, over seventeen chapters, we meet the men whose decisions, actions and omissions combined like some slow burning powder trail to trigger a final, cataclysmic conclusion; the foundering, in mid Atlantic, of the biggest moving object ever seen on the face of the planet. One by one, a series of individuals take a bow. Seemingly omnipotent owners and hugely experienced ship's officers. Engineers and designers. Would be rescuers and embattled wireless operators. We meet them as individuals, not supermen. Their histories, backgrounds and life experiences are assessed for the first time ever, putting their actions on the night that Titanic sank into a context, a light as stark as that of the distress rockets, arcing into the sky