Chapter 4 Overview

Contemporary molecular biology is concerned principally with understanding the mechanisms responsible for transmission and expression of the genetic information that governs cell structure and function. As reviewed in Chapter 1, all cells share a number of basic properties, and this underlying unity of cell biology is particularly apparent at the molecular level. Such unity has allowed scientists to choose simple organisms (such as bacteria) as models for many fundamental experiments, with the expectation that similar molecular mechanisms are operative in organisms as diverse as E. coli and humans. Numerous experiments have established the validity of this assumption, and it is now clear that the molecular biology of cells provides a unifying theme to understanding diverse aspects of cell behavior.

Initial advances in molecular biology were made by taking advantage of the rapid growth and readily manipulable genetics of simple bacteria, such as E. coli, and their viruses. The development of recombinant DNA then allowed both the fundamental principles and many of the experimental approaches first developed in prokaryotes to be extended to eukaryotic cells. The application of recombinant DNA technology has had a tremendous impact, initially allowing individual eukaryotic genes to be isolated and characterized in detail and more recently allowing the determination of the complete sequences of cellular genomes. The early development of molecular biology, recombinant DNA, and the experimental approaches used to investigate the function of eukaryotic genes are discussed in this chapter.