The book covers...

Corrosion costs billions of dollars to each and every single economy in the world. Corrosion is a chemical process, and it is crucial to understand the dynamics from a chemical perspective before proceeding with analyses, designs and solutions from an engineering aspect. The opposite is also true in the sense that scientists should take into...

Over the past 10 years, work on acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) has become the paradigm of translational research that began with the discovery of a recurrent chromosomal translocation, followed by the identification of the genes and proteins involved, finding their molecular functions in transcriptional control, establishing mouse models...

Hepatitis delta virus (HDV), which causes severe acute and chronic liver disease, was discovered nearly 30 years ago following the detection of a novel antigen-antibody system in hepatitis B virus carriers. HDV has continued to surprise and fascinate medical science ever since. This volume reviews recent developments in HDV research, from...

Although the utility of human antibodies as medical therapeutics for cancer and immune diseases has been well-established, it is only beginning to be realized for the treatment of viral infectious diseases. Polyclonal immunoglobulins have long been used for some viral diseases, but they have limited potency and disease scope. Only a single...

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) has been recognized in printed records dating from the sixteenth century, and since the eradication of rinderpest (cattle plague) in the early part of the twentieth century it has been rec- nized as the most important and feared disease of cattle and other dom- tic livestock. The beginning of the twenty-first...

Chemokines represent a family of over 40 small proteins that, for the most part, are secreted into the environment and function by binding to G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) that are expressed on numerous different cell types. When initially identified close to 30 years ago, these molecules were associated with various human inflammatory...

What do the following have in common: the promise of Botox as the key to everlasting youthful looks; E. coli O157 hamburger disease; a mysterious illness which killed 35 heroin users in 2000; and the assassination by poisoned umbrella-tip of a Bulgarian dissident in the 1970s? The answer is that all of these are caused by toxins, the powerful...