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Molecular Diagnostics: A Training and Study Guide

Posted on: Saturday, 29 November 2003, 06:00 CST

Molecular Diagnostics: A Training and Study Guide By Gregory J. Tsongalis and William B. Coleman, 364 pp, with illus, Washington, DC, American Association for Clinical Chemistry, 2002.

Fifty years ago, James Watson burst into an English pub shouting about the DNA structure he and Francis Crick had just developed. More recently, Francis Collins and Craig Venter held formal press conferences to announce their team's contributions to the sequencing of the human genome. In the interim, medicine has rapidly incorporated many new scientific advances, and today molecular diagnostic testing for bacterial and viral identification, chromosome analysis in hematopoietic and solid organ malignancies, and DNA analysis for forensic and parental identification all represent the standard of care. Instruction within such a complex, rapidly expanding field presents many difficulties. To meet this challenge, Drs Tsongalis and Coleman collected educational materials from various undergraduate and graduate courses, and compiled them into a single paperback volume, Molecular Diagnostics: A Training and Study Guide.

The first 6 chapters of this book provide the background in biochemistry and molecular biology needed to understand the general principles and methods of molecular diagnostic testing, which are then described in chapters 7 and 8. Specific clinical applications used in oncology, hematopathology, infectious disease, and identification are covered in the final 5 chapters. This organization generally works well, with each chapter building on its predecessor, although chapter 3, "Specimen Collection, Handling, Preparation, and Processing," misplaced amid the DNA biology chapters, would fit more comfortably after the biochemistry chapters as an introduction to testing methods. The book concludes with 225 self-assessment questions, a wonderful resource for readers reviewing for examinations or simply testing their recall and application of the key concepts.

The book's page layout is identical to the "handouts" format of Microsoft PowerPoint, that is, 1 column of 3 "slides" adjacent to a column of blank lines for jotting notes. While such an arrangement is ideal for actively taking notes during a lecture, here the blank lines are unnecessary and occupy space that would be better used by enlarging the slides and figures to improve their readability. The book's figures are small and simple, but they are instructive and include procedural flow charts, electrophoretic gels, pedigrees, and gene structures.

The concise, bullet-point text and "lecture-slide" format contribute to a concise, readable review of molecular diagnostics. Although readers will not get bogged down in irrelevant minutiae, there are occasional places where detail is lacking, as with unexplained abbreviations or unlabeled figures. This, indeed, is the major weakness of the book: by providing lecture notes without an actual lecture, there is no opportunity for an expert to make helpful connections between major concepts, to explain diagrams, or to answer questions. Nonetheless, more good than harm is done with this unorthodox book layout.

The book's accompanying CD-ROM contains all the chapters in Microsoft PowerPoint format and the Self-Assessment Test as a Microsoft Word file. Although merely an exact electronic copy of the book, the CD is useful in that it allows the material to be presented as a lecture or incorporated into other projects (within copyright limits).

Molecular Diagnostics: A Training and Study Guide best serves as a summary guide for a short course covering the essentials of this complex and rapidly expanding field. It is also well suited for residents training in this area or reviewing this topic for the clinical pathology portion of board examinations, or for laboratory technicians seeking an overview of the science behind their assays.

JASON A. JARZEMBOWSKI, MD, PhD

Ann Arbor, Mich

Copyright College of American Pathologists Nov 2003

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