This book, like other monographs of the Cellular Organelles series, is
not a comprehensive review, but an introduction to the study of
cytoskeleton. Accordingly, we describe only the main facts and concepts
related to cyto- skeleton. Needless to say, selection and interpretation
was influenced by the personal interests and opinions of the authors,
although we attempted to be as fair as possible. We wished to
familiarize the reader not only with well- established facts, but with
current unsolved problems. Therefore, the words "possibly," "maybe,"
"not known," and "not clear" are much more frequent in this text than in
many others. In accordance with the style of the series, relatively
short lists of addi- tional readings are given at the end of each
chapter; these lists contain mostly the recent reviews and a few
original papers describing certain phenomena in detail. Few references
are cited in the text; these citations are given to help the reader find
the source of certain new data and theories, which are not discussed at
length in the reviews. In contrast, many well-established facts and
widely known theories are not cited.