TIBS - November 1977 261

Everaerts et al. have written a very ex- haustive and beautiful account of iso- Curate’s egg tachophoresis as they see it. The manner of presentation is uncompromisingly man-

Modern Practice of Gas

darin: it is strictly addressed to the select Chromatography

circle of physical chemists trained to freely edited by Robert L. Grob, published by John

move from mathematical to verbal treat- Wiley & Sons, New York, 1977. $28.-

ment. It is however, with all of its thorough- (approx. &16.-) (688pages)

ness and exactitude, a partial view of iso- Each year a short course on gas chroma- tachophoresis, strictly limited to the par- tography has been held in Philadelphia by titular kind of orthodoxy (or heresy, de- the very-active Chromatography Forum pending which side you are on) that dis- of Delaware Valley.This book is the prod- regards developments outside the monas- uct: it contains essentially a series of lec- tery as trivial or wrong, and that has its tures from the courses which have been very own ritual, centered in this case typed up and reproduced together. around the capillary apparatus and its The core of the book is a very useful inner sanctum, the detection system. and practical account of the techniques

Like other orthodoxies, this one is also and instrumentation used in modern gas totally unconcerned with popular needs or chromatography. In particular this in- demands that isotachophoresis may be eludes an excellent treatment of the col- able to serve, particularly its use as a umn and column selection and another on macromolecular fractionation and isola- detectors, while a further fatherly chapter tion tool. Serving higher and purer goals, provides wise general advice on the choice the high priests of isotachophoresis within of integrators and minicomputers for data the monastery have devoted themselves to handling. The final section of the book has application of the capillary technique to live chapters on a selected range of specific small organic acids and metabolites, al- applications of gas chromatography. though many competitive techniques like Apart from a rather broad survey of the thin layer partition chromatography, gas use of gas chromatography for physico- chromatography or high voltage paper chemical measurements (surface areas, electrophoresis have long taken care of thermodynamic functions of solution, vi- demand in this field. rial coefficients, kinetics and transport

Everaerts’ particular orthodoxy is the processes), these are strongly slanted to- gospel according to St. A. J. P. Martin, in wards analytical problems in the bio- terminology, in the equations, in the ritual chemical sciences. There is a chapter on of capillary and detector. It largely dis- trace analysis (with particular reference to regards what seems to me as the main- aqueous samples), one on foods, one on stream : the terminology and equations of drugs, and another on a wide variety of Longsworth-Alberty-Jovin, and that great molecules of clinical significance. Many of popularizer of it all, Leonard Ornstein, these analytical problems are discussed whose application of isotachophoresis with very specific operating details. alias steady-state stacking alias multi- In my view, the translation from spoken phasic zone electrophoresis to proteins has word to printed page is least satisfactory revolutionized protein analysis in bio- in the introductory section, in which the chemistry for the last quarter of a century. basic ideas of gas chromatography are ex- But that took place in ‘the world’, out- plained and related to separation tech- side the walls of the monastery. niques in general and to the underlying

On physical-chemical grounds, Ever- concepts of thermodynamics and kinetics. aerts’ theory and program share with Orn- What may well have been thought-provok- stein a fundamental birth defect: Failure ing broad-brush lectures here lack clarity to test for maintenance of the steady-state and precision: furthermore this is com- moving boundary conditions throughout the stack as the sequence of phases devel- ops (see T. M. Jovin in ‘Methods of Pro- tein Separation’ (N. Catsimpoolas, ed.) vol. 2, Plenum Press, 1976, p. 37). Not- withstanding the impeccable beauty of the gospel as formulated.

ANDREAS CHRAMBACH

A. Chrambach is Senior investigator in the Endo- crinology and Reproduction Research Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human De- velopment, Bethesda, Maryland. U.S.A.

pounded by a number of uncorrected errors in the text. For the most part the overlap between authors has been reduced to an acceptable extent and the fluctuations of style and approach are refreshing rather than irritating. Unfortunately, and per- haps inevitably, the book fails to be really comprehensive and there are notable omis- sions, for example, g-c mass spectrometry which is but briefly mentioned by two of the authors. The bibliographies mostly provide background to the individual chapters but often fail to lead on to a fuller coverage of the field.

Something then of a curate’s egg, but despite this well worth having both for the novice and for the more experienced user of gas chromatography.

C. S. G. PHILLIPS

C. S. G. Phillips is Fellow of Merton College, Oxford University, Oxford, U.K.

Iced-up enzymology Cryobiochemistry : An Introduction by Pierre Dou~ou, published by Academic Press Inc., London, 1977. g12.60 (approx. $24.65) (x + 286 pages)

If the term Cryobiochemistry is circum- scribed to mean the study of enzymes and related proteins at temperatures below 273.15”K, then Pierre Douzou is writing on the subject which he has created.

Pierre Douzou developed Cryoenzymo- logy because he is interested in the rela- tion between the dynamic and structural aspects of enzymes. One can either speed up methods for observing structure changes or slow down the processes to be observed. For some systems both ap- proaches are needed. There clearly has been a big gap between those who pro- duced more and more detailed three di- mensional structures of enzymes - and in some notable cases enzyme substrate com- plexes - and those of us who resolved the temporal structure of reactions into ele- mentary steps.

Douzou’s approach was that of a very scholarly physical chemist. An enormous effort went into the properties of solvent mixtures. The dielectric constant of the solvent environment is a critical para- meter for retaining the native structure of proteins. It was found that a judicious balance between solvent composition and temperature could keep the liquid solvent at low temperature at a dielectric constant close to that of water.

In this book the data on solvent prop- erties obtained by Douzou and his col- leagues, as well as in other laboratories, are tabulated and discussed. After that,