Book Review

GENE CLONING AND MANIPULATION.by Christopher Howe

Cambridge University Press, 1995, 210 pp.

This well written, concise, and clearly illustratedtextbook is designed to teach basic concepts underlyingstandard methods of gene cloning to students with alimited background in biochemical and molecular ge-netic knowledge. It is not a manual of experimentalprotocols similar to the protocol manuals found innearly every molecular biology or molecular geneticlaboratory. Instead, it is a textbook that provides stu-dents new to this subject some basic background infor-mation including concise definitions of terminologythat will help the student gain familiarity with generalconcepts necessary to understand and conduct basicexperiments and to facilitate their understanding ofthe literature.

The book consists of nine chapters with appropriatetables and illustrations on approximately half of thepages. The illustrations are simple black and white linedrawings that communicate effectively the basic strat-egies and concepts underlying experiments. In chapterone entitled ‘‘The Tools for the Job,’’ the subjects re-striction endonucleases and other modifying enzymesare discussed clearly. The basic principles and tech-niques for electrophoresis of nucleic acids is also welldescribed in this chapter. Chapter two entitled ‘‘SimpleCloning’’ provides straight forward explanations for ba-sic transformation experiments with a broad but gen-eral discussion of various vectors, modifications, link-ers, and adapters. Additional vector systems are de-scribed in chapter three. The general principlesunderlying genomic and cDNA library construction arediscussed in chapter four. One chapter, chapter six, isentirely devoted to polymerase chain reaction (PCR)methods and experiments. The text for this chapter isrelatively limited as the general principles of PCR andits uses are explained in 11 pages. References for allchapters are listed at the end of the textbook and aregenerally limited to other standard texts, book chap-ters, and other publications from the mid-1980s

through the early 1990s. This relatively short textbookis well indexed making it relatively easy to find appro-priate reading material.

As with any textbook of this nature, the discussionsare relatively limited and not always current. For in-stance, in the discussion of genomic libraries there is abrief mention of yeast artificial chromosomes (YACs),but no mention of more currently used large genomiclibraries including bacteriophage and P1 derived geno-mic clones, BACs and PACs. The last chapter in thebook is devoted to a brief presentation of genetic ma-nipulation of other organisms including other bacteria,yeast, drosophila, and vascular plants. This sectionnicely illustrates the different critical elements in-volved in modifying the genomes of various organisms.

In summary, this is a clearly written, concise, el-ementary textbook useful for students with a relativelylimited background in gene manipulation and cloningstrategies. It will help students in their first laboratoryrotations and will be useful in undergraduate class-rooms where general laboratory methods are taught. Itis doubtful that graduate students in molecular biol-ogy, cellular biology, genetics or related fields wouldfind this particular text enormously helpful given thewide variety of texts, papers, laboratory manuals, andon-line molecular biology resources currently available.The book may have utility for non-laboratory basedstudents of other healthcare professions, such as ge-netic counseling students, who are reading this litera-ture but may not be familiar with the experimentalmethods that are utilized. I will keep this textbook onthe shelves in my laboratory and will encourage rotat-ing students who are new to the field to read particularchapters related to their ongoing experiments.

Elizabeth M. PettyUniversity of Michigan Medical CenterDivision of Molecular Medicine and GeneticsDepartments of Internal Medicine and

Human GeneticsAnn Arbor, Michigan

American Journal of Medical Genetics 75:338 (1998)

© 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.