In the real laboratory world, we know that even established methodology is adapting and changing at an alarming rate and that new experimental approaches are regularly appearing on the horizon. This small book fills an important niche in the market, for it aims, and I believe succeeds, in bringing the reader up to date with recent innovations in established techniques as well as introducing us to more state of the art methodology. The book contains ten chapters, all written by experts in the particular fields and interestingly, the editors have recruited over half the authors from the commercial sector. These contributions tend to bias their chapters towards products available from their particular companies, although in general they seem to have covered their subjects fairly comprehensively. Each chapter covers a review of the technique, concentrating on recent innovations and then discusses likely future trends.
Most chapters end with protocols covering recent advances or more specialised approaches.
Each chapter is also accompanied by an extensive list of references, in most cases concentrating on papers published in the last five years. All chapters refer to material published last year, which is a good indication that the editors and the publisher have succeeded in bringing this book to the bookshelves without undue delay. The first chapter covers general PCR techniques and is written by a group of authors from Stratagene. Sadly the accompanying figures are black and white copies of coloured diagrams from the company s catalogue and some of the detail has been lost during reproduction. A specific utilisation of PCR, thermal cycle sequencing, is described in the next chapter, which contains a generalised protocol for the technique.