Preface
Historically, a variety of changes occurring in organisms were
first recognized as morphological or histological ones and described with qualitative and visual terms, ie., with special anatomical and/or pathological terms. Therefore, even though there
is a huge collection of morphological information on physiological as well as pathological states of cells, that information
was highly descriptive and not always linked with molecular
changes effectively. What is intended in this book is to provide
newly developed histochemical methods with details, which
should enable us to connect morphological information with
molecular biological information.
The contents covered of this laboratory manual of molecular
histochemical techniques show how to detect DN A strand breaks
in situ (more familiarly, in individual cells or tissue sections), as
an inevitable marker of apoptosis, how to detect specific sequences of DNA and RNA in situ, and how to detect specific
DNA binding proteins like gene specific transcription regulatory
factors in situ. All of them have been recently established and
well recognized as essential techniques in actively growing fields
of science beyond the histochemical world.
Of course, I invited the good standing, experienced scientists
in practice to write the protocols, so that people who are
interested in them have only to follow the protocols. Consequently, we are confident that the protocols in themselves or
with a slight modification will soon be found to satisfy people
in most cases.
It is our great pleasure to see what happens when using these
molecular histochemical techniques which merge the classical
morphological approach with the biochemical and molecular
biological one. We hope this book can help those who want
to know detailed methods on molecular histochemistry and
Historically, a variety of changes occurring in organisms were
first recognized as morphological or histological ones and described with qualitative and visual terms, ie., with special anatomical and/or pathological terms. Therefore, even though there
is a huge collection of morphological information on physiological as well as pathological states of cells, that information
was highly descriptive and not always linked with molecular
changes effectively. What is intended in this book is to provide
newly developed histochemical methods with details, which
should enable us to connect morphological information with
molecular biological information.
The contents covered of this laboratory manual of molecular
histochemical techniques show how to detect DN A strand breaks
in situ (more familiarly, in individual cells or tissue sections), as
an inevitable marker of apoptosis, how to detect specific sequences of DNA and RNA in situ, and how to detect specific
DNA binding proteins like gene specific transcription regulatory
factors in situ. All of them have been recently established and
well recognized as essential techniques in actively growing fields
of science beyond the histochemical world.
Of course, I invited the good standing, experienced scientists
in practice to write the protocols, so that people who are
interested in them have only to follow the protocols. Consequently, we are confident that the protocols in themselves or
with a slight modification will soon be found to satisfy people
in most cases.
It is our great pleasure to see what happens when using these
molecular histochemical techniques which merge the classical
morphological approach with the biochemical and molecular
biological one. We hope this book can help those who want
to know detailed methods on molecular histochemistry and