Preface/Front Matter

Abstract

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has been the site of two meetings on the lactose operon, the meeting organized by Jon Beckwith and David Zipser in September 1969 and the meeting we had the pleasure of organizing in July 1976. The first lactose operon meeting and its associated book served as a catalyst for an outpouring of molecular analyses of the lac operon. The second meeting presented the fruition of the studies, which are critically reviewed in the first half of this volume. We hope that these chapters will give students and scientists an up-to-date picture of the molecular basis of gene regulation in the lac system. The second half of this volume presents analyses of other bacterial genetic regulatory systems. These chapters describe mechanisms which contrast markedly with that found in the lac operon. The examples presented will provide the reader with an overview of various alternative approaches to gene regulation. When the decision was made in early 1980 to reprint this book as a paperback edition, we decided to check the various topics presented to see whether any area needed additional coverage. In fact, we could identify one such topic, attenuation. Although the concept was discussed in Terry Platt’s chapter on the tryptophan operon, neither the extent to which this type of regulation was used nor its possible molecular mechanism was known at the time. We have attempted to present this new information by including three reprints as an Appendix to this printing. These are the original papers proposing