Preface/Front Matter

Abstract

Microorganisms are exceptionally attractive systems in which to study development because of the facility with which they can be manipulated by genetic and biochemical techniques. This book brings together, in a single volume, reviews on prokaryotic and eukaryotic microbes that have proved to be successful systems for addressing general problems of cellular differentiation, cell-cell communication, and morphogenesis. A special feature of this volume is the comparison of similar biological problems posed by very different experimental systems, such as cell division in Escherichia coli and Caulobacter, spore formation in Bacillus and Streptomyces, cell-cell communication in Streptococcus and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and social behavior in myxobacteria and Distyostelium, Despite this apparent diversity, a coherent set of themes pervades each paper: the role of nutritional signals in triggering development and adaptation, the way in which sets of genes are activated in ordered sequences during differentiation, polarity and the role of positional information, cell communication, and the transduction of sensory information.

This monograph derives in part and was indeed motivated by the Conference on Microbial Development held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the Spring of 1983. The success of that meeting and the sense of excitement felt by its participants was due to the fact that workers in diverse systems found themselves on common ground not only in the questions they ask and in the experimental approaches they employ, but in the manner by which both prokaryotes and eukaryotes have apparently solved the problems inherent in developing systems. Limitations of space have forced us