Principles and Models of Biological Transport
This book, like the first edition, deals with the mass transport processes that take place in living systems, with a focus on the normal behavior of eukaryotic cells and the organisms they constitute, in their normal physiological environment. As a consequence of this focus, the structure and content of the book differ from those of traditional transport texts. We do not start with the engineering principles of mass transport (which are well presented elsewhere) and then seek biological applications of these principles; rather, we begin with the biological processes themselves, and then develop the models and analytical tools that are needed to describe them. This approach has several consequences. First of all, it drives the content of the text in a direction distinctively different from conventional transport texts. This is because the tools and models needed to describe complex biological processes are often different from those employed to describe more well-characterized inanimate systems. Many biological processes must still be described phenomenologically, using methodologies like nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Simple electrical analogs employing a paucity of parameters can be more useful for characterization and prediction than complex theories based on the behavior of more well-defined systems on a laboratory bench. By allowing the biology to drive the choice of analysis tools and models, the latter are consistently presented in the context of real biological systems, and analysis and biology are interwoven throughout. Owing to its more biological focus, the book includes more biology and physiology than most texts on engineering in the life sciences, and some parts will be easier to follow for readers with some background in biology. To keep the text selfcontained in this respect, an early chapter is devoted to those aspects of cell biology most relevant to biological transport systems. A few words on the use of the term “models” in the title. The explosive growth of molecular biology in the past several decades demands that space be devoted to the molecular-level events that underlie the observables of biological transport. This means that “models” must now be understood to include physical and structural models of transport systems and processes at the molecular level, as well as the mathematical models of transport that continue to be developed to describe biological transport mechanisms at all levels.
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