Catalogus : Recensies
Recensies
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Rudolf Röttger, Robert Knight, Wilhelm Foissner † (Eds.) A Course in Protozoology Second revised edition Volume 4 ISBN: 978-3-8322-7534-1 Prijs: 14,50 € / 29,00 SFR |
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Dieses in Englisch geschriebene und überarbeitete Werk der deutschen Erstausgabe „Praktikum der Protozoologie" (Gustav Fischer Verlag, Stuttgart, Jena, New York, 1995) ist der erste Kurs in Protozoologie für Englisch sprechende Studenten. Die meisten Autoren der Erstausgabe haben bei der 2. Auflage mitgearbeitet. Es wurden jedoch sieben Kapitel gestrichen, aber sechs neue Kapitel wurden wieder angefügt. In der Erstausgabe waren vor allem Protozoen aus Lebensräumen Mitteleuropas Praktikumsobjekte. In der Neuauflage werden aber viele weltweit vorkommende Gattungen und Arten behandelt. Die Kapitel gliedern sich in der Regel in die Abschnitte „Einführung", „Technische Vorbereitungen" und „Gattungen und Arten" (dargestellt auf zahlreichen Tafeln mit REM- und TEM-Aufnahmen bzw. Strichzeichnungen). Am Ende eines jeden Kapitels sind wichtige Originalarbeiten, Übersichtsartikel und Monographien zum Thema aufgeführt. Den Abschluss des Buches bilden ein Lehrbuchverzeichnis und ein ausführliches Register. Zusammenfassend ein sehr empfehlenswertes Werk für alle an der Protozoologie Interessierte. |
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| Bron: Mitteilungsblatt Nr. 2/2012 "Mikroskopische Gesellschaft Wien", Seite 25 | |
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Rudolf Röttger, Robert Knight, Wilhelm Foissner † (Eds.) A Course in Protozoology Second revised edition Volume 4 ISBN: 978-3-8322-7534-1 Prijs: 14,50 € / 29,00 SFR |
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Books focused on the more practical aspects of the teaching of unicellular eukaryote biology are not common, especially in the English-speaking world. It is thus very pleasing to see the publication of "A Course in Protozoology," an updated and modified translation from the German "Praktikum der Protozoologie" published in 1995 that focuses on just that: the more hands-on aspects of the teaching of the biology of these organisms. The editors made a big effort to cover as wide a ränge of protozoans as possible, and as a consequence, the book includes chapters not only on common things like ciliates (six chapters), dinoflagellates (two chapters) or thecate and naked amoebae (three chapters), but also on more "difficult" groups like radiolarians, kinetoplastids, diplomonads or foraminiferans. In addition some algae are also covered, for example diatoms, chrysophytes and euglenids. In the preface the editors explain their choice of the word "protozoology" instead of "protistology" for the title of the book and say that readers of a textbook entitled "A course in protistology" would expect to find more unicellular algae and lower fungi included. They are perhaps right, but it has to be said that they akeady walked a large part of the road to transform this protozoological book into a protistological one; the addition of only a few chapters (green algae, slime moulds, oomycetes, cryptomonads/haptophytes come to mind) would neatly finish the job. This is something that they could Because there really should be more editions of this excellent book. Its main contribution is that it provides detailed practical information and an incredible amount of tricks about where to obtain and how to prepare unicellular eukaryotes in order to observe them and show them to students. You want to find kineto plastids in the wild? Look in sheep keds or in the blood of eels, which you can get in any fish shop. How about coccidian oocysts? Use mice or chicken faeces and float them in a "dense solution" whose composition is explained in detail. How do you observe pinocytosis in a live Amoeba proteusl You put it in a 1:10 solution of egg white. Can you encourage Noctiluca cultures to bioluminesce when you need them to? To a degree, yes, you add a bit of formaldehyde to the sample and the culture may go out in a blaze of light. Where do you find pelobionts? Suctorians, chonotrichs? How do you remove the plasma membrane of thecate dinoflagellates? How do you stain their thecal pates? And ciliate alveolar boundaries? And chrysophyte siliceous structures? How do you maximize the survival time of parabasalian symbionts outside their termite hosts? The illustrations are excellent. All chapters contain profuselylabeled drawings not only of organisms, but also of important as pects of their biology, things like life cycles, ways of feeding or nomenclatural schematics of thecal or skeletal parts that help greatly in the interpretation of what is being seen. Photographs are a great asset to this, and many chapters additionally contain an assortment of images obtained not only through light microscopy but also through SEM or TEM. I don´t want to finish without mentioning a quirky but very useful feature of the book. The editors obtained the help of Prof. Alfred Hoffmann, a now late Linguist at the University of "Bochum, to gu through the index^andrnarkThe accented Vöwel in the Latin names of all the organisms included. I am going to go on a limb and suggest that the correct pronunciation of Latin names is not a strength of the majority of English-speaking protozoologists, and so even though some may not wish to modify deeply-held convictions about the proper pronunciation in English of Latin names, the book manages to at least inform them of die error of their ways. A commendable effort. Negative comments? Very few. In places the translation to English retains too much of a German tinge and the reading flow •suffers. Some chapters are perhaps a bit too descriptive and don´t emphasize enough things that students can actually do with the organisms that they collect.Yet in spite of all this, the main thing that I find myself wishing for is chapters on the protist groups that were not covered. I think that in itself is a strong comment of the chapters that did get written. As the teacher of a course in protistology, I have already (successfully!) used a lot of the information contained in the book, and not only that, but I have been inspired to develop whole new labs based on the information presented (vampyrellids feed ing on filamentous algae, anyone?) I can´t think of a better endorsement than that. This is very good book. Go buy it. —JUAN F. SALDARRIAGA, Department of Botany, 6270 University Boulevard, Vancouver, BC V6T ITA, Canada. |
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| Bron: Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology; 2011; Seite 272 | |
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