The primary goal of Slonczewski (Kenyon College) and Foster (U. of South Alabama) in fashioning this textbook on microbiology was to balance coverage of microbial ecology and medical microbiology. Part of the way they do this is to "explore the origin of life as a dynamic story of discovery that integrates microfossil data with physiology and molecular biology." They first cover the microbial cell in chapters discussing the origin and discovery of microbial life; observation of the microbial cell; cell structure and function; bacterial culture, growth, and development; environmental influences and control of microbial growth; and virus structure and function. Chapters follow on genomes and chromosomes; transcription, translation, and bioinformatics; gene transfer, mutations, and genome evolution; molecular regulation; viral molecular biology; and molecular techniques and biotechnology. Energetics and catabolism; respiration, lithotrophy, and photolysis; biosynthesis; and food and industrial microbiology are covered next, followed by discussion of bacteria, archaeal, and eukaryotic diversity; microbial ecology; and microbes and the global environment. The final chapters turn to the fields of medicine and immunology and cover human microflora and nonspecific host defenses, the adaptive immune response, microbial pathogenesis, microbial diseases, antimicrobial chemotherapy, and clinical microbiology and epidemiology. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Read Less