Molecular Biology of the Cell: The Problems Book, 6th Edition PDF
Preview Molecular Biology of the Cell: The Problems Book, 6th Edition
Molecular Biology of THE CELL Sixth Edition The Problems Book This page intentionally left blank to match pagination of print book Molecular Biology of THE CELL Sixth Edition The Problems Book John Wilson and Tim Hunt Garland Science Vice President: Denise Schanck Associate Editor: Allie Bochicchio Production Editor and Layout: EJ Publishing Services Senior Production Editor: Georgina Lucas Master Reviewer: Alastair Ewing Copyeditor: Jo Clayton Proofreader: Sally Huish Illustrator: Nigel Orme Designer: Matthew McClements, Blink Studio, Ltd. Back cover photograph and design: Nigel Orme Indexer: Medical Indexing Ltd. Permissions Coordinator: Sheri Gilbert © 2015 by John Wilson and Tim Hunt John Wilson received his PhD from the California Institute of Technology and pursued his postdoctoral work at Stanford University. He is currently Distinguished Service Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. His research interests include genome instability and gene therapy. He has taught medical and graduate students for many years, coauthored books on immunology, molecular biology, and biochemistry, and received numerous teaching honors, including the Robertson Presidential Award for excellence in education. Tim Hunt received his PhD from the University of Cambridge where he taught biochemistry and cell biology for more than 20 years. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he spent his summers teaching cell and molecular biology at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He left Cambridge in 1990 and moved to the Cancer Research UK Clare Hall Laboratories, just outside London, where he worked on the control of the cell cycle until his retirement in 2010. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Lee Hartwell and Paul Nurse. This book contains information obtained from authentic and highly regarded sources. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. Reprinted material is quoted with permission, and sources are indicated. A wide variety of references are listed. Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but the author and the publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or for the consequences of their use. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or used in any format in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-0-8153-4453-7 (paperback) Published by Garland Science, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, an informa business, 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, US 3 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, OX14 4RN, UK Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Visit our website at http://www.garlandscience.com We dedicate this book to the memory of our comrade, Julian Lewis. This page intentionally left blank to match pagination of print book vii Preface Welcome to he Problems Book, which aims to help students appreciate the ways in which an understanding of how cells work, as discussed in Molecular Biology of the Cell, Sixth Edition, by Alberts et al., can be further explored through experi- ments and simple calculations. As always, we hope to stimulate our readers to ask questions as well as to learn and digest the stories that “the big book” tells. In real life, knowledge and understanding come from research, which entails curios- ity, puzzlement, doubt, criticism, and debate as well as performing experiments. Groping one’s way through the fog of uncertainty during a project is a slow and often discouraging process; eureka moments (even if one is lucky) are few and far between. Nevertheless, those moments catch the essence of the drama, and we have tended to focus on them, where we have been able to cast them in the form of a problem. In this way, for student and teacher alike, we hope to encourage a questioning attitude to biology. Without curiosity there would be neither science nor scientists. We have been making up problems together since 1985, and the revision lead- ing to this new edition of he Problems Book has taken us more than four years. here are several new things about this edition. First, the book is now in color. As well as improving its look as a whole, we think this will improve the clarity and intelligibility of the igures. Second, we’ve added a new type of question, MCAT Style, modeled on the kind of problems that are found in most medical school admissions tests. hese were drafted by Doug Kellogg at the University of Cali- fornia, Santa Cruz, and we think they make a great addition to the book. Indeed, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that these questions allowed us to frame problems in new and interesting ways. Elsewhere, we have done a considerable amount of pruning, partly to make space for these new problems and partly to eliminate problems that were showing their age or were no longer relevant to the parent text. he organization of he Problems Book remains largely the same. here are Terms to Learn, Deinitions, and True/False sections in every chapter. Next come hought Problems, of which some are more challenging than others—they may be playful, or serious, but all are designed to make the reader think. Following these is a section called Calculations, designed to deal with quantitative aspects of cell biology. he calculations in this book are mostly very straightforward, usu- ally involving no more than the interconversion of units, yet they provide a solid framework for thinking about the cell. Are cell-surface receptors sparse in the plasma membrane, or jam-packed? Do molecules difuse across a cell slowly, or in the blink of an eye? Does chromatin occupy most of the nuclear volume, or just a tiny fraction? How fast could a tomato plant grow, theoretically? Numeri- cal analysis of such questions is very important if one is to gain an understand- ing for the molecular basis of cell biology. he Data Handling section contains research-based problems. Our original brief was to compose problems based on experiments so as to allow readers to get a better feel for the way in which biologi- cal knowledge is obtained. It is tremendously important to keep asking, “How do we know that? What’s the evidence?” or to wonder how one might go about ind- ing something out. Often it’s not at all obvious, often the initial breakthrough was a lucky chance observation, made while investigating some completely diferent viii PREFACE business. In fact, it takes most of us years of research experience to grasp the idea of how one simple fact “can illuminate a distant area, hitherto dark” (Boveri, 1902). Seeing how these tiny shards of evidence give rise to the big picture often involves considerable imagination as well as a certain discipline, to know how much weight the evidence will bear. We hope we have sometimes, at least, been able to capture the essence of how experiments lead to understanding. To do justice to the authors of the experiments we use in these problems, however, we strongly recommend recourse to the original papers, whose references we always provide. A newly compiled section, Medical Links, contains problems of particular interest to health science students. We hope that the organization and classiication of problems will help both student and teacher to ind what they are looking for. How should this book be used? We composed it by a process of constant dialogue and discussion, and we suspect that the most fruitful use of the problems will be to stimulate discussions in class, or between students. Tackling selected problems as homework will also surely help. Teachers have told us that they ind ideas for exam questions here, and all the answers to our questions are now provided in he Problems Book, for many of these problems are diicult to answer and are not intended to be set as tests. Rather, we hope that readers will be intrigued (as we were) by the questions we ask, and after thinking a bit will want to see what the answer is, what form the discussion takes, and how to get at thinking about this particular kind of a prob- lem. he answers to the end-of-chapter problems in Molecular Biology of the Cell, Sixth Edition can also be found in the back of this book, including the answers to newly written problems for Chapters 21 through 24. As always, we want to hear from our readers, for despite our best eforts, we do not always get things right. Please email John Wilson at [email protected] or Tim Hunt at [email protected] with your comments or queries, and we’ll do our best to answer them. ix Acknowledgments It remains true that our rate of production, over the years, averages at about one chapter per year, but even this glacial progress would not have been possible without a tremendous amount of help from friends and colleagues whose names are recorded in previous editions of he Problems Book, which appeared in 1989, 1994, 2002, and 2008. As ever, we are indebted to Alastair Ewing who worked through all the new problems, discovering embarrassing mistakes and inding better, clearer, and more graceful ways of putting things. Denise Schanck has been a tower of strength, as always, and Emma Jefcock a brilliant and startlingly ei- cient designer and friend. Allie Bochicchio coordinated our activities and kept us in good order. Mike Morales helped to set up an instant home-away-from-home during meetings in California, and his cheerful humor helped tremendously. Adam Sendrof, who took care of marketing and gave us audience feedback, was unfailingly supportive. We are especially grateful to all the authors of Molecular Biology of the Cell, who have been extremely helpful in the selection and reine- ment of problems that appear in the main text. We thank them most warmly for their suggestions. Once again, Nigel Orme has been a huge help with the illustra- tions, particularly in the business of adding color. he person who made the most important contribution to this edition, however, is Doug Kellogg of the Univer- sity of California, Santa Cruz. Doug is an old friend who allowed himself to be persuaded to take on the task of composing MCAT-style questions, despite his heavy responsibilities as a teacher, researcher, and new father. We are very lucky, however, to have the loving support of our spouses and families, Lynda, Mary, Celia, and Aggie. hey’ve put up heroically with our regular absences and preoc- cupations.
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