"That's a special bra!" No woman wants to hear this sentence when her boyfriend sees her in her underwear for the first time. If you're in a relationship with someone who has an autism spectrum disorder, it's better to question social norms than to take them seriously anyway. Speaking of "norms", I'm not completely normal either, by the way, because: you can be crazy even without a diagnosis! So what is it like to be in a relationship with a man who ticks differently in many ways? And that while you actually have enough to do taming your own monkeys in your head? Honestly, it's refreshing, enriching and valuable, but also incredibly challenging and exhausting. Creativity and patience are just as important as a sense of humor and healthy self-esteem.

Most research and all publications in mass spectrometry address either applications or practical questions of procedure. This book, in contrast, discusses the fundamentals of mass spectrometry. Since these basics (physics, chemistry, kinetics, and thermodynamics) were worked out in the 20th century, they are rarely addressed nowadays and young scientists have no opportunity to learn them. This book reviews a number of useful methods in mass spectrometry and explains not only the details of the methods but the theoretical underpinning.

"Protein Structure Analysis - Preparation and Characterization" is a compilation of practical approaches to the structural analysis of proteins and peptides. Here, about 20 authors describe and comment on techniques for sensitive protein purification and analysis. These methods are used worldwide in biochemical and biotechnical research currently being carried out in pharmaceu tical and biomedical laboratories or protein sequencing facilities. The chapters have been written by scientists with extensive ex perience in these fields, and the practical parts are well documen ted so that the reader should be able to easily reproduce the described techniques. The methods compiled in this book were demonstrated in student courses and in the EMBO Practical Course on "Microsequence Analysis of Proteins" held in Berlin September 10-15, 1995. The topics also derived from a FEBS Workshop, held in Halkidiki, Thessaloniki, Greece, in April, 1995. Most of the authors participated in these courses as lecturers and tutors and made these courses extremely lively and successful. Since polypeptides greatly vary depending on their specific structure and function, strategies for their structural analysis must for the most part be adapted to each individual protein. Therefore, advantages and limitations of the experimen tal approaches are discussed here critically, so that the reader becomes familiar with problems that might be encountered.