J.H. Clark - Böcker

Political pressure has translated into legislation requiring industry to reduce waste. This has resulted in a major investment in new ways of tackling long standing chemical problems. It is widely recognized that high environmental standards can be a lifeline to profitability in the increasingly competitive markets of the future, and it has been estimated that expenditure on new capital equipment, environmentally friendly products, processes and services will run into hundreds of billions of pounds before the end of the century. There is an unprecedented opportunity for chemists to develop and apply new methods that result in waste reduction, and this book describes examples of new chemical methods used to reduce waste at source and to treat toxic waste. This book is written for research, development and production chemists, senior managers in the fine chemical and chemical intermediate manufacturing industry, and for regulatory authorities. Academic and research chemists with an interest in industrial processes and chemical technology should find this book an important reference source.

Receptors and Gene Expression It is now more than three years since the last Meadow Brook Conference on Hormones, and a great deal has happened in the meantime. We have become comfortable with the totally unanticipated fact that the coding sequences of genes are in discontinuous arrangements and that the RNA transcribed from them must be extensively processed to form messenger RNA. We have also learned about the strategy of "mixing and matching" of genetic segments so that a small amount of DNA can go a long way in producing a huge variety of different proteins, as in the immunoglobulin system. The explosive effort directed toward DNA sequence analysis has led us to the conclusion that there are signals within the DNA that specify sites of transcription initiation and possibly sites for interacting with regulatory molecules such as hor­ mones and their receptors. The current intense interest in the structure of chromatin beyond the nucleosome-that is, the superstructural characteris­ tics of the genetic material-is finally yielding meaningful results that give promise for understanding the regulation of gene activity. ROBERT F. GOLDBERGER Preface Research on the molecular mechanism of steroid hormone action continues at an extraordinary pace and a great deal of progress has been made. Steroid hormones have been localized on target genes providing the long awaited evidence for the concept of a direct effect of the steroid-receptor complex on gene regulation. Purified steroid receptors have been dissected to identify different functional domains.

Within the last two decades endocrinological research has taken a definite tum toward biochemistry and molecular biology. This has resulted in a new discipline called' 'molecular endocrinology. " Studies on the mechanism of hormone action have continued to make headlines with fundamental discov­ eries in receptor action and gene regulation. Recently the insect endocrino­ logists have also begun to explore the molecular mechanism of steroid hor­ mone action taking advantage of the vast number of Drosophila mutants, the library of Drosophila gene, and several well-characterized cell-lines. The availability ofthe recombinant DNA technology has provided a truly revolu­ tionary tool in the hands of the molecular endocrinologists. "Gene Regula­ tion by Steroid Hormones" is compiled and presented in this frontier spirit, and we hope that this volume will serve not only the active investigators in the field but will also be very useful to students and researchers with a gen­ eral interest in regulatory biology. The book is an offshoot of the Conference on Molecular Mechanism of Steroid Hormone Action held at the Meadow Brook Mansion of Oakland University in the fall of 1978. We wish to acknowledge the financial assist­ ance from the National Science Foundation and Oakland University. The conferees will never forget the warmest hospitality of Dr. LOWELL EKLUND and his staff at the Meadow Brook center and we also wish to express per­ sonal gratitude to many of our students and colleagues for helping us to make the conference a great success.

It is the object of this series of monographs to present the experiments and interpre- tations of a given laboratory. We have attempted in this volume to present our view of receptor-steroid interactions and their relation to steroid-induced responses. This view is necessarily biased by our own experimental results. While we have tried to in- clude the views and results of others, this volume is not meant to be comprehensive. Rather it is selective and examines those topics within the general field of steroid hor- mone action which we have addressed at the laboratory bench. The work reviewed in this volume would not exist without the help and support of many associates. Our mentors included Jorge Awapara, Jack Gorski, Henry Komer, Bill Ray, and Mike Zarrow. Associates instrumental in this work include George Barr, John Burgner, Sam Campbell, Constance Cardasis, Hitkan Eriksson, Stan Glasser, Jim Hardin, Mohammed Kalimi, Bruce Lester, Barry Markavarich, Shirley McCormick, Tony Means, Dan Medina, Ann Miller, Bert O'Malley, Helen Padyku- la, Zigmund Paszko, Dale Snow, Susan Upchurch and Marian Walters.Students who have contributed to this effort include John Anderson, Joe DeLibero, Aaron Hsueh, Katrina Kelner, Debbie Metzger, Randy Richards, Jim Schaeffer, Mike Tytell, Lane von Brunt, and Cheryl Watson. Technicians without whose assistance this work could not exist include Toni Cetti, Wendy D'Attilio, Jeanie Haselby, Lily Hsueh, Helen Hyland, Jim Kovar, Kathy O'Connor, and Peggy Sansone.