Page 6 - Algae Anatomy, Biochemistry, and Biotechnology

Preface

This book is an outgrowth of many years of research aimed at studying algae, especially micro-
algae. Working on it, we soon realized how small an area we really knew well and how superficial
our treatment of many topics was going to be. Our approach has been to try to highlight
those things that we have found interesting or illuminating and to concentrate more on those
areas, sacrificing completeness in so doing.
This book was written and designed for undergraduate and postgraduate students with a
general scientific background, following courses on algology and aquatic biology, as well as for
researchers, teachers, and professionals in the fields of phycology and applied phycology. In our
intention, it is destined to serve as a means to encourage outstanding work in the field of phycology,
especially the aspect of teaching, with the major commitment to arouse the curiosity of both
students and teachers. It is all too easy when reviewing an intricate field to give a student new
to the area the feeling that everything is now known about the subject. We would like this book
to have exactly the reverse effect on the reader, stimulating by deliberately leaving many doors
ajar, so as to let new ideas spring to mind by the end of each chapter.
This book covers freshwater, marine, and terrestrial forms, and includes extensive original
drawings and photographic illustrations to provide detailed descriptions of algal apparatus. We
have presented an overview of the classification of the algae followed by reviews of life cycles,
reproductions, and phylogeny to provide conceptual framework for the chapters which follow.
Levels of organization are treated from the subcellular, cellular, and morphological standpoints,
together with physiology, biochemistry, culture methods and finally, the role of algae in human
society. Many instances of recent new findings are provided to demonstrate that the world of
algae is incompletely known and prepared investigators should be aware of this.
Each of the chapters can be read on its own as a self-containing essay, used in a course,
or assigned as a supplemental reading for a course. The endeavor has been to provide a
hybrid between a review and a comprehensive descriptive work, to make it possible for the
student to visualize and compare algal structures and at the same time to give enough references
so that the research worker can enter the literature to find out more precise details from the original
sources.
The bibliography is by no means exhaustive; the papers we have quoted are the ones we have
found useful and which are reasonably accessible, both very recent references and older classic
references that we have judged more representative, but many excellent papers can be missing.
In our opinion, too many references make the text unreadable and our intention was to put in
only enough to lead the reader into the right part of the primary literature in a fairly directed
manner, and we have not tempted to be comprehensive. Our intention was to highlight the more
important facts, hoping that this book will complement the few specialized reviews of fine structure
already published and will perhaps make some of these known to a wider audience. Our efforts
were aimed at orientating the readers in the mare magnum of scientific literature and providing
interesting and useful Web addresses.
We are grateful to the phycologists who have contributed original pictures; they are cited in the
corresponding figure captions. We are also grateful to the staff at CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida,
particularly our editor, John Sulzycki, for his patience and human comprehension in addition to
his unquestionable technical ability, and to the production coordinators, Erika Dery and Kari
A. Budyk.