1: J Cell Sci. 2000 Nov;113 (Pt 21):3683-4. 

ProlIferation

Irvine R.

Dept Pharmacology, University of Cambridge, UK.

Biology of Phosphoinositides edited by Shamshad Cockroft Oxford University Press
(2000) pp. 341. ISBN 0-19-963764-4 32.50 I can remember in the early days of the
inositide explosion (around the mid-80s) we used to discuss over a few beers the
idea of signing some kind of 'non-proliferation treaty' because the number of
inositol phosphates seemed to be getting a little out of control. In the end we
decided that because mathematically there were only 63 possibilities, it
couldn't get much worse, so there wasn't any point in worrying. That turns out
to have been a false security because there were only two polyphosphoinositol
lipids then, and now there are seven - all the seven species feasible by
phosphorylating the 3, 4 and 5 hydroxyls on phosphatidylinositol (PI) - and we
also hadn't reckoned on the emerging complexities of the glycosyl-PIs, and of
course the possibility that you could actually cram more than six phosphates on
an inositol ring (as in the pyrophosphate-containing IP7 and IP8) would have
been dismissed as absurd. Now, bemused as we are by the ever-increasing number
of players, we face an even more awesome proliferation of functions.
Phosphatidylinositol 4, 5-bisphosphate (PI45P2) is the chief offender here, as
it seems to be cropping up in every remote corner of eukaryotic cells
controlling a bewildering array of functions, but the 3-phosphorylated lipids
are not much more well-behaved, and what all this means in the present context
is that putting together a book on 'The Biology of Phosphoinositides' that can
be contained in one volume has become impossible. There has to be a selection
process, and Shamshad Cockcroft has done an admirable job in choosing the areas
that are most topical, with a sufficiently broad sweep that almost anyone will
find at least one of the chapters useful. But this very same expansion and
proliferation makes equally difficult the choice of what to cover in a single
chapter, and I found that the most successful chapters in this book are those
which focus on either a very new (and thus restricted) part of the field, or
simply a part that is easy to draw a boundary around. Thus, for example, Harald
Stenmark's chapter deals only with PI3P and membrane trafficking, and thus it
covers every reference that there is on the subject, but is still short enough
and clear enough to be a good read. Steve Shears' chapter on inositol
3,4,5,6-tetrakisphosphate succeeds for exactly the same reason (and thank
goodness there is one chapter on the inositol phosphates; all the rest are on
the lipids where so much of the action has been in the 1990s - are the 2000s
going to be the decade of the inositol phosphates?). Some efforts on larger
areas are fine attempts, but can suffer from being just too full of information.
For example, the simply heroic chapter by Len Stephens and his colleagues on all
the rest of the 3-phosphorylated lipids that Harald didn't cover, runs to 60
pages plus 408 references, and I must admit I was reaching for the aspirin
bottle somewhere in the middle. Also, some of the chapters perhaps suffer a bit
in competition with reviews in journals - now there is a real proliferation
problem (see below) - and with some of them I felt a strong sense of deja revu,
whatever the merits of the individual chapter (e.g. those by Sue-Goo Rhee and
colleagues on PI-PLC regulation, by Flanagan and Janmey on the cytoskeleton, and
by Woscholski and Parker on the inositide phosphatases). I realise at this point
that I am raising a much more general question about the need (or not) for books
of this ilk in the 21st century. This book is a collection of reviews about
selected aspects of a particularly active area of research. However, almost all
journals now publish reviews, and we also have tools such as ISI, Medline etc
that enable us to find all these up-to-date reviews on whatever topic we want at
the push of a computer key. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED)

PMID: 0011034895 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]


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