Plant Science 157 (2000) 141
Book review
www.elsevier.com/locate/plantsci
Anther and Pollen — from Biology to Biotechnol-ogy, Edited by C. Cle´ment, E. Pacini and J.-C. Audran, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1999. ISBN 3-540-64986-7; 263 pages, 92 figures, hardbound, DM 229.00
This volume consists of 23 relatively short arti-cles written by scientists working in eight Eu-ropean countries, primarily France, Italy and The Netherlands. For a complete listing of authors and chapter headings visit http://www.springer.de/ cgi-bin/search –book.pl?isbn=3-540-64986-7.
The volume does not contain a foreword or any other paragraph that would explain the editorial goal for this book. On first sight, I thought that I was looking at conference proceedings, but this is probably incorrect. For a monograph on general pollen biology and biotechnology, many areas one would expect in such a treatise are completely missing, and most of the contributions are too specialized instead.
In a flyer distributed by the publishers pollen is promoted to the plant structure most widely used by humans, and the book is described as covering pollen development from induction to germination and pollen behavior in vitro. The part on pollen behavior in vitro consists primarily of six essays dealing with anther and pollen culture.
I would characterize five or six of the 23 articles
as reviews. These include a delightful historical review on anther dehiscence by C. Keijzer, on anther carbohydrates by the editors and on andro-genesis and albinism in grasses by Caredda and Cle´ment.
The rest of the contributions are short research reports of vastly differing quality. Some reports are undoubtedly interesting and at the cutting edge of pollen research. Others would have had problems to make it into a regular journal. It is difficult to review this book without specifically reviewing every single article (which does not seem appropriate). Interested readers should look up the respective web site given above and decide for themselves if they need to see certain reports printed in this volume to stay current in their research. Clearly, this book is not for the on-hand bookshelf of scientists in plant (cell) biology and biotechnology but for the immediate experts in-volved with pollen research.
F. Hoffmann
Department of De6elopmental and Cell Biology,
School of Biological Sciences,
Uni6ersity of California,
Ir6ine, CA 92697-2300,
USA
E-mail: [email protected]
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