Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry

The Lehnninger text has a long history, but given that biochemical knowledge doubles every 5 years or so, it matters what a text offers now, not in the past. The writing is simple, direct, engaging, not too easy but neither too esoteric. The principles (as the title suggests) and the unity in diversity are emphasized, so that the student understands biochemical principles not merely facts, acronyms, pathways. The graphics are very professional. They are comparable to any review article in hot journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, etc. The rendering of protein surfaces, and the different angles through which a structure is seen is outstanding (a good example is the section on the ribosome). The structures have been rendered from the PDB (protein data bank) coordinates. Most are rendered in the ribbon representation, but in many cases the surface is rendered in grey, depending on the level of detail. Contrast this with the 3rd edition of Voet: the authors have not bothered to re-render their graphics, most are identical to the 1995 edition, a time when people only cared if you could generate a structure. Voet's graphics are not done uniformly; the backgrounds can be white, grey, black, some structures are taken directly from the original literature and vary widely in the format and rendering. It is not enough that Voet updated the text on biochemical developments from 1995-2004. The Lehninger pages on the most important protein folds, for example, are very helpful in giving the student a feel for the fold, the domain composition, the size, and names of model proteins one is expected to encounter over and again in the research literature. The text contains brief solutions to all the end-of-chapter problems
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