The student of biological science in his final years as an undergraduate and his first years as a graduate is expected to gain some familiarity with current research at the frontiers of his discipline. New research work is published in a perplexing diversity of publications and is inevitably concerned with the minutiae of the subject. The sheer number of research journals and papers also causes confusion and difficulties of assimilation. Review articles usually presuppose a background know ledge of the field and are inevitably rather restricted in scope. There is thus a need for short but authoritative introductions to those areas of modern biological research which are either not dealt with in standard introductory textbooks or are not dealt with in sufficient detail to enable the student to go on from them to read scholarly reviews with profit. This series of books is designed to satisfy this need. The authors have been asked to produce a brief outline of their subject assuming that their readers will have read and remembered much of a standard introductory textbook on biology. This outline then sets out to provide by building on this basis, the conceptual framework within which modern research work is progressing and aims to give the reader an indication of the problems, both conceptual and practical, which must be overcome if progress is to be maintained.

Inhalt
1 An Introduction to Bioenergetics.- 1.1 The Flow of Energy and Materials in Biology.- 1.2 Adenosine 5?-triphosphate (ATP).- 1.3 Phosphoryl Transfer Reactions.- 1.4 Substrate-Level Phosphorylation.- 1.5 Oxidation Reduction Reactions.- 1.6 Respiration and Oxidative Phosphorylation.- 2 The Components of the Respiratory Chain.- 2.1 Nicotinamide Nucleotides.- 2.2 Nicotinamide Nucleotide Transhydrogenase.- 2.3 Respiratory Chain Dehydrogenases.- 2.4 Ubiquinone.- 2.5 Cytochromes.- 2.6 The Composition and Reconstitution of the Respiratory Chain.- 2.7 Spectrophotometric Analyses.- 2.8 Bacterial Respiratory Chains.- 2.9 Electron and Hydrogen Transfer.- 3 The Organization and Function of the Coupling Membrane.- 3.1 Mitochondrial Structure and Function.- 3.2 The Organization of the Mitochondrial Energy Conservation System.- 3.3 Mitochondrial Solute Transport.- 3.4 The Morphology and Organization of the Bacterial Coupling Membrane.- 3.5 Bacterial Solute Transport.- 4 Energy Coupling.- 4.1 Energy Coupling Sites.- 4.2 Respiratory Control.- 4.3 Crossover Points.- 4.4 Uncoupling Agents.- 4.5 Phosphorylation Inhibitors.- 4.6 Reversed Electron Transfer.- 4.7 The Energized State.- 5 Mechanisms of Oxidative Phosphorylation.- 5.1 The Chemical Hypothesis.- 5.2 The Chemiosmotic Hypothesis.- 5.3 The Localized Proton Hypothesis.- 5.4 The Conformational Hypothesis.- 5.5 Chemiosmotic, Localized Proton or Conformational Hypothesis?.- Suggestions for Further Reading.