Molecular biology has rapidly advanced since the discovery of the basic
flow of information in life, from DNA to RNA to proteins. While there
are several important and interesting exceptions to this general flow of
information, the importance of these biological macromolecules in
dictating the phenotypic nature of living creatures in health and
disease is paramount. In the last one and a half decades, and
particularly after the completion of the Human Genome Project, there has
been an explosion of technologies that allow the broad characterization
of these macromolecules in physiology, and the perturbations to these
macromolecules that occur in diseases such as cancer. In this volume, we
will explore the modern approaches used to characterize these
macromolecules in an unbiased, systematic way. Such technologies are
rapidly advancing our knowledge of the coordinated and complicated
changes that occur during carcinogenesis, and are providing vital
information that, when correctly interpreted by
biostatistical/bioinformatics analyses, can be exploited for the
prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of human cancers.
The purpose of this volume is to provide an overview of modern molecular
biological approaches to unbiased discovery in cancer research. Advances
in molecular biology allowing unbiased analysis of changes in cancer
initiation and progression will be overviewed. These include the
strategies employed in modern genomics, gene expression analysis, and
proteomics.
