In the mid 1970s O’Farrell described a method of 2D gel electrophoresis which could resolve very complex mixtures of thousands of proteins into individual species, seen as spots on the final gel. It is a powerful yet relatively simple and inexpensive technique, that has been adopted by many laboratories for various purposes. This book, it is claimed, is the first to be devoted solely to this technique. It is divided into three parts, the first being that describing the method. The first chapter ably describe silver staining techniques, ‘Western blotfocusing or nonequilibrium pH gradient electrophoresis in the first dimension and an SDS gel in the second dimension. Space is allocated for consideration of the role of the computer in data analysis and storage. Remaining chapters in the section describee silver staining techniques, ‘Western blotting’ and methods for peptide mapping polypeptides extracted from gels. Although these techniques are of course equally well applicable to 1D electrophoresis, their inclusion in this book is useful. One unfortunate aspect of the book is, however, that only the O’Farrell type of 2D gel is described, although various other types do exist which use different systems of electrophoresis. A couple such systems are mentioned in Sung’s