This volume records the proceedings of an International Symposium, held at Le Bischenberg, Alsace, France, in April 23-27, 1979. The meeting was convened to get a comprehensive view of the immense activity that had occurred in the field since the previous conference on gangliosides held at Mont Sainte-Odile, Alsace, France, in April 1973. At a conference on Enzymes of Lipid Metabolism held at the same place in April, 1977, several of the participants from the first ganglioside conference in 1973 met again. All previous participants agreed that the first meeting with its many frank and stimulating lectures, round tables and informal discussions had been of tremendous importance for the activity in the field and led to many personal contacts and a warm friendship among the ganglioside researchers. The success of the first meeting must be ascribed largely to one single man, PAUL MANDEL.

Therefore, we decided to dedicate the next ganglioside conference to him and I was given the privilege to arrange the meeting together with him and staff members at Centre de Neurochimie, Strasbourg. The Symposium on The Structure and Function of Gangliosides was arranged to honour PAUL MANDEL for his unique and never failing efforts to promote and strengthen international collaboration in all fields of neurochemistry. He has worked harder than most scientists to raise money for international meetings, and we are many researchers who have had the privilege to participate in more than one conference arranged by Centre de Neurochimie. PAUL MANDEL has been able to give all the conferences a large fund of his own spirit and rich humanity, and nobody who has had the opportunity to participate in a meeting organized by PAUL MANDEL will ever forget his great generosity and appreciation of others' research work.

PAUL MANDEL is a great scientist and humanist with the most precious quality, goodness. The elucidation of the chemical structure of the ganglioside stored in Tay-Sachs disease and the development of an assay procedure for the enzymic lesion had a tremendous clinical implication. It initiated prenatal diagnosis of inherited disorders and a world screening programmed for carriers of lethal traits. The discovery that one single ganglioside is the specific receptor for cholera toxin stimulated an intense search for the receptor function of other gangliosides for bacterial toxins, viruses, hormones and transmitter substances. All these aspects are reviewed. A recent practical development which can be of fundamental importance for the preparation of effective vaccines is also described - the use of ganglioside GM1 for the large scale affinity chromatographic isolation of cholera toxin. The book also gives the reader a vision about the role of gangliosides in synaptic transmission.

The receptor role of gangliosides has created urgent need for a better isolation and separation methods and more refined techniques for determination of their chemical structure. The comprehensive reviews on the metabolism of gangliosides and on their localization in various tissues, cells and sub-cellular organelles are a must for the understanding of the physiological role of the gangliosides. Many of the findings are novel and have not yet appeared in the scientific journals. It is therefore hoped that the reviews will be up to date when the book becomes available to the profession although the area is under such active investigation.