THIS b)ook comprises six papers read at the fourth annual Symposium of the Society for the Study of Human Biology. This Society was founded in 1958 with the object of furthering the study of the biology of human populatons and of man as a species, and the present symposium reviewed the considerable recent advances towards an understanding of human variation. Each paper is a discrete entity with...

5'V NMR is a highly sensitive tool to probe the nature of the metal binding sites of human transferrin (Tf). At a field strength of 11.7 T, the two vanadium(V) binding sites in V,-Tf are characterized by 51V chemical shifts at -529.5 and -53 1.5 ppm versus VOCl,. These shifts are assigned to the Cand N-terminal sites, respectively, based on the 51V NMR spectra of vanadate addition to FeN-Tf and...

Iron is an essential nutrient for almost all living cells, and pathogenic bacteria are faced with severe iron limitation in the mammalian host (1). To make iron available during infection, most microorganisms produce and transport into the cell specific iron chelators (siderophores) or acquire iron bound to exogenous iron carriers, like xenosiderophores, heme, or the host’s transferrins (2). Du...

Weykamp et al. recently reported on their efforts toward the harmonization of carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT) measurements in serum (1). Alcohol biomarkers play a key role in the identification of alcohol abuse, a chronic disorder with enormous health and legal implications. CDT is a widely used biomarker for the detection of excessive alcohol use that has a high diagnostic sensitivity...

The article by Legros et al. (1 ) in this issue is the latest of several descriptions and evaluations of serum transferrin isoform separation by capillary electrophoresis (CE). It is of particular interest because their method is able to separate all of the major isoforms and because the sensitivity and specificity of asialoand disialo-transferrin for assessment of alcohol use are compared agai...