Page 152 - AWSAR 2.0

128 || AWSAR Awarded Popular Science Stories - 2019
While science and technology were making great advancements, from nineteenth to twenty-first century, the most important factor called as “healthy life style” was forgotten. It’s like when a runner forgets to pass the baton to his/her teammate in a relay race. Nobody understands that whatever we do in our life is for “healthy lifestyle and food” only. People have spoiled their circadian rhythm in a quest to earn money. Hence, as a return gift, we get many unperceived diseases. Among the most dangerous diseases, diabetes and obesity are the two partners in crime known for their slow killing. They are the most uninvited visitors in the human body.
This thought awakened the researcher in me to find a solution. I shared this creative spirit with my mentor, Professor K. Balamurugan, who introduced an elegant tiny tot in my life and made me believe in working on a nematode! For the whofole world, Sydney Brenner was the one who first
proposed an elegant nematode
the form of Caenorhabditis
elegans for research purposes.
But for me, Sydney Brenner
came in the form of my mentor
who introduced C. elegans in
his lab and fulfilled my wish to
research on it. I am fortunate to
have a Caenorhabditis elegans
as a model organism for my
research. Further, I have learnt
that through C. elegans system
one can follow or understand
new findings related to many
diseases, and other interactions
of human system. C. elegans
is a small, free-living nematode. Owing to its notorious behaviour that it is really a joy to watch them creeping and crawling on a nematode growth medium and become established as a standard model organism for a great variety of genetic investigations, being especially
useful for studying developmental biology. C. elegans was the first multicellular eukaryote to have its whole genome sequenced making it easier to study the pathways and mechanisms related to it.
What do you think obesity means? Is it a condition? Or is it a disease? Actually, scientists say that obesity is a condition in which fat accumulates on various parts of the body likes muscles, and bones and creates a negative impact on the health. If a person has more than 20% extra weight, this means, he/she is considered obese. To check whether we are in this category or not, Body Mass Index (BMI) is calculated and considered as a rough indicator. Certainly, obesity can
happen to anyone because of many reasons like stress, junk food, lifestyle and insufficient sleep. These factors lead to direct risk of having diabetes.
In an obese individual, the fat tissues undergo some stress, and have to process
What I am trying to mean is that there is a very fine line between health and disease which we keep transgressing. If any sudden change, or modulation, occurs in the condition, it brings new problems. Among the strange diseases, diabetes and obesity are like a brother and a sister.