The Nucleolus
Within the past two decades, extraordinary new functions for the nucleolus have begun to appear, giving the field a new vitality and generating renewed excitement and interest. These new discoveries include not only the novel functions of the nucleo
- PDF / 9,421,225 Bytes
- 433 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 14 Downloads / 152 Views
For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/6876
wwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
Mark O.J. Olson Editor
The Nucleolus
Editor Mark O.J. Olson University of Mississippi Medical Center Department of Biochemistry 2500 North State Street Jackson, Mississippi 39216 USA [email protected]
ISBN 978-1-4614-0513-9 e-ISBN 978-1-4614-0514-6 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0514-6 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2011935031 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Preface
The Nucleolus: A Nuclear Body Full of Surprises The deeper we delve into nature, the more surprises we find. The nucleolus is no exception; as we learn more about the structure and functions of the nucleolus, the more surprising it becomes. It has taken almost two centuries to reach this point. In fact, well over a century passed between the first description of the nucleolus (Wagner 1835) and the publication of definitive experiments that established its primary function as a factory for ribosome biogenesis during the 1960s (summarized by Hadjiolov 1985). In the past four to five decades, research has been largely focused on investigating its structure and ribosome assembly process, defining its component parts and determining how it does and what it does. Still ongoing, these efforts are now at a relatively mature level, taking us out of the “black box” era. The picture that has emerged is a highly complex, multistep vectorial process that utilizes a large number of components. Although there is still much to be learned about the mechanisms of ribosome biogenesis, the field has moved into structural and functional analyses of individual components and larger sub-complexes as well as studies on integration and regulation within the system and by the cell. With the primary focus of research during the second half of the twentieth century on the elucidation of the role of the nucleolus in ribosome assembly, most researchers did not expect that it could do much else. Consequently, the nucleolus managed to keep its other functions hidden. However, within the past two decades something extraordinary happened; new functions for the nucleolus began to appear. In many cases, some of these were met with skepticism,
Data Loading...
