Learn and Develop

In The Nucleus, researchers from more than forty leading international laboratories describe state-of-the-art methods for isolating nuclei and their components and for studying their structure and activities, including some pathology-associated features. Volume 2: Chromatin, Transcription, Envelope, Proteins, Dynamics, and Imaging presents biophysical approaches to study the mechanical properties of nuclei, together with a comprehensive range of imaging methods. These include FISH, FRAP, FRET, molecular beacons, fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, single molecule tracking, and combing DNA for optical microscopy, recognition imaging for atomic force microscopy, and hybridisation, tomography, and spectroscopic imaging for electron microscopy.

Materials science needs a microscopic, if not a nanoscopic knowledge in order to correctly understand and improve the properties of engineering materials. Most of the mechanical, physical and chemical properties of inorganic materials are directly influenced by their microstructure (i.e. size, shape, and orientation of grains and phases composing the bulk) and this fact is strongly affected by the atomic composition and distribution. For materials composed of grains it is obviously of primary importance to know the zone of bonding of these grains, i.e. the grain boundaries. This has been a must since the beginning of the last century. Thanks to the development of investigation techniques characterising this period a dramatic quantity of data concerning grain boundaries and their chemistry as well as their links to macroscopic properties has been collected and elaborated...