Plant Science 156 (2000) 261 – 262
Book review
www.elsevier.com/locate/plantsci
Molecular Biology of Woody Plants, Volume 1, Edited by S. Mohan Jain and S.C. Minocha, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. ISBN 0792360125; NLG 450, USD 238.5, GBP 148.5
The molecular biology of woody plants is a young field of science in which active research has been going on throughout the world in recent years. Molecular biology applications, which are attaining ever-increasing importance in basic sci-ence, may also have enormous possibilities in tree breeding and forestry. Woody plants present a heterogeneous group of species that include both gymnosperms and angiosperms. Features common to these plants include long generation and rota-tion times, large genome sizes, high degree of polymorphism, and a low degree of domestication compared to agricultural crop species. So far the achievements of this field have primarily been published in separate articles. The present book represents a survey and synthesis of diverse, yet related, information from the rapidly advancing studies in the expanding field of molecular biology of woody plants.
There will be two volumes of the book. Volume I has been divided into two sections. Section I is entitled Genetic Engineering and Gene Expres-sion, and Section II is Molecular Genetics. Section I includes 12 chapters and Section II 9 chapters, all of them written by leading scientists in the field. The first chapter of the book starts with an overview of the present state-of-the-art of the reg-ulation of gene expression, chromatin organiza-tion, transcriptional factors, gene silencing and post-translational factors. These topics are pre-sented in order to identify their influence on opti-mization of the expression of transgenes in plants, thus providing an excellent start for the whole section.
In the following chapters a broad coverage of various aspects is presented, including options for
the genetic engineering of sterility, molecular aspects of bud dormancy, wood formation, cellulose and lignin biosynthesis, the molecular biology of the somatic embryogenesis of conifers, the molecular biology of tropical nitrogen fixing trees and cell wall proteins. As the editors state in the foreword to the book, a situation in which the editors are responsible for the selection of the topics, and the content of the chapters is at the discretion of the authors (and of course peer re-views), will lead and has led to the overlap of material in some chapters. It might have been better for the audience if the authors working in similar areas had been encouraged to collaborate. For example, chapter 2 (Molecular biology of somatic embryogenesis in conifers) and chapter 12 (Gene expression during Pseudotsuga menziesii embryogenesis: low molecular weight proteins) could perhaps have been combined in one chapter.
Section II, Molecular Genetics, includes several interesting articles about the role of molecular markers in evolution, genome mapping and tree breeding. Chapter 17 deals with the discovery and mapping of quantitative trait loci (QTL) in forest trees and will be greatly appreciated by the tree breeders. Chapters 19 and 20 describe the ad-vanced technical challenges in the mapping of QTLs in Eucalyptus and Populus, respectively. In the Eucalyptus chapter, the state-of-the-art in marker-assisted selection (MAS) as well as the future perspectives of MAS are well discussed. In the Populuschapter, QTL mapping has been sidered from a biological perspective, i.e. the con-cepts that may affect tree breeding efficiency (heterosis, developmental integration etc). The first chapter of the Section II dealing with tissue cul-ture of woody plants and its relevance to molecu-lar biology could have been included among the first chapters of Section I, which generally de-scribes the basic information needed for genetic
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engineering or molecular biology. As in Section I, in Section II too the problem with this kind of book is the overlap of material: all the chapters start with a description of the whole range of molecular markers.
In conclusion, this book is a good collection of articles dealing with the molecular biology of woody plants written by the leading scientists in the field. It is easy to get an overview of the present state-of-the-art. The book would have pro-vided an even more delightful reading experience if the layout of the chapters had been the same, and
the font size in some of the chapters had been increased. However, due to the interesting content of the book it can be readily recommended not only for researchers in different fields (geneticists, molecular biologists, plant physiologists etc), but also for traditional tree breeders.
Hely Ha¨ggman
The Finnish Forest Research Institute,
Punkaharju Research Station, 584 50Punkaharju, Finland
E-mail: hely.haggman@metla.fi
