PREFACE
With the advent of increasingly robust technologies
that provide cellular and organismal
views of molecular processes, progress
in biochemistry continues apace, providing both new
wonders and new challenges. The image on our cover
depicts an active spliceosome, one of the largest
molecular machines in a eukaryotic cell, and one that
is only now yielding to modern structural analysis. It is
an example of our current understanding of life at the
level of molecular structure. The image is a snapshot
from a highly complex set of reactions, in better focus
than ever before. But in the cell, this is only one of
many steps linked spatially and temporally to many
other complex processes that remain to be unraveled
and eventually described in future editions. Our
goal in this seventh edition of Lehninger Principles
of Biochemistry, as always, is to strike a balance: to
include new and exciting research findings without
making the book overwhelming for students. The primary
criterion for inclusion of an advance is that the
new finding helps to illustrate an important principle
of biochemistry.
With every revision of this textbook, we have striven
to maintain the qualities that made the original Lehninger
text a classic: clear writing, careful explanations of
diffi cult concepts, and insightful communication to students
of the ways in which biochemistry is understood
and practiced today. We have coauthored this text and
taught introductory biochemistry together for three
decades. Our thousands of students at the University
of Wisconsin–Madison over those years have been an
endless source of ideas on how to present biochemistry
more clearly; they have enlightened and inspired us.
We hope that this seventh edition of Lehninger will, in
turn, enlighten current students of biochemistry everywhere,
and inspire all of them to love biochemistry as
we do.