Incluye referencias bibliográficas e índice

The first edition of Principies of´Biochemistry, written by Albert Lehninger twenty-ñve years ago, has served as the starting point and the model for our four subsequent editions. Over that quarter-century, the world of biochem-istry has changed enormously. Twenty-ñve years ago, not a single genome had been sequenced, not a single membrane protein had been solved by crystallography, and not a sin¬gle knockout mouse existed. Ribozymes had just been dis-covered, PCR technology introduced, and archaea recognized as members of a kingdom sepárate from bac¬teria. Now, newgenomic sequences are announced weekly, new protein structures even more frequently, and re-searchers have engineered thousands of different knock-out mice, with enormous promise for advances in basic biochemistry, physiology, and medicine. This fifth edition contains the photographs of 31 Nobel laureates who have received their prizes for Chemistry or for Physiology or Med¬icine since that first edition of Principies of Biochemistry. One major challenge of each edition has been to re-flect the torrent of new information without making the book overwhelming for students having their first en-counter with biochemistry. This has required much care-ful sifting aimed at emphasizing principies while still conveying the excitement of current research and its promise for the future. The cover of this new edition ex-emplifies this excitement and promise: in the x-ray struc-ture of RNA polymerase, we see DNA, RNA, and protein in their informational roles, in atomic dimensions, caught in the central act of information transfer