Description:
This is a sound, scholarly, yet very readable book that organizes the pertinent material on a relatively popular topic in bacterial genetics. In a complicated area where articles are scattered throughout the literature, it should prove an excellent reference source for researchers in microbial genetics and general microbiology, as well as in certain aspects of clinical medicine and in nutrition.Drug-resistance factors are accessory chromosomes, independent of the bacterial chromosome proper, which are of increasing practical concern as they cause a large portion of the antibiotic resistance that is prevalent in medicine and in veterinary practice. Yet these factors are only part of a much larger class of accessory chromosomes known as "plasmids" which have played a prominent role in the development of bacterial genetics of molecular biology as a whole. Two other well-known classes are the sex factors, which enable bacteria to transfer their genes to recipients by conjugation, and the bacterial… Read More