Book reviews

This volume is the first one of a series on ‘Chemistry of Plant Protection’, which appears under the editorship of Dr. Haug and Prof. Hoffmann, both from the Monheim Plant Protection Centre of Bayer, Leverkusen. The series is meant to cover new developments in crop protection, biological and biochemical discoveries as well as advances in synthetic chemistry. It will continue the handbook ‘Chemie der Pflanzenschutz und Schadlingsbekampfung’, edited by R. Wegler, which appeared from 1970-1982 in eight volumes, but the old arrangement of the material on the basis of insecticide-, fungicide-, herbicide- etc. research has been abandoned. The volumes will, according to the editors, contain invited, critical review papers. Although each of them will be more or less topic oriented, contributions from diverse areas of plant protection will occasionally be united in one volume, in view of rapid publication. The first volume contains four review articles, three of which cover various aspects of fungicides, which inhibit sterol biosynthesis (s.b.i’s). T. Kato discusses sterol biosynthesis in fungi as a target for fungicides (thus mechanism of action of s.b.i’s), D. W. Kramer the chemistry of s.b.i’s, and K. H. Kuck and H. Scheinpflug the biology of s.b.i’s. All three papers provide up to date reviews on these topics by highly qualified specialists. The fourth review by D, M. Norris, which falls outside the competence of the reviewer, deals with various aspects of antifeeding compounds in plants, animals and humans. It is not related to the topic of the first three reviews, although the comma after the words ‘Sterol Biosynthesis’ in the title of this volume in fact, does suggest a relation at first glance. This could have been avoided by omitting the comma.