BIOS Instant Notes in Molecular Biology

This was a great book. Like getting the notes from a real smart friend. I needed to quickly update my skills. I got it from the library and didn't want to return it. All of my college texts kept me wandering through sentence after sentence - this one straight to the point, but with application notes.

This is an impressive book intended only for the serious student or major. I was quite pleased to find the book in my local Borders Books, although I would say it's significantly more technical than what most people would probably be looking for there. You'll need to have read at least one other introductory upper-division text or taken a course on cell biology or molecular biology to benefit from it. I have had that but as I am mainly a neurobiologist by training I was pretty rusty at this point and so I only understood about 1/2 of the book. :-)That having been said, since the book is only about 300 pages you can use it to get a quick refresher or update on many topics as I did. Some of the topics were still familiar, such as basic DNA replication, the cell cycle, and recombination. But some of the more specialized topics weren't, such as the E. coli sigma 70 promoter, cosmids, YACS (yeast artificial chromosomes), and BACS, and RNA Pol III genes: 5S and tRNA transcription. There was also a section on oncogenes which is something I didn't know much about. The illustrations and diagrams are plentiful and are excellent too and really help supplement the text.

This book is great. I was a biology major at MIT and I couldn't tell you how many lectures for my classes seemed to come write out of the book. It's certainly not enough to use by itself, but it's a great way to focus the information either prior to a lecture or even prior to a test.