Page 370 - AWSAR 2.0
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 346 || AWSAR Awarded Popular Science Stories - 2019
Sizing Up
  Ms. Kirti Gupta*
Email: kirtigupta.4102@gmail.com
Life comes in all shapes and sizes as minute as the single-celled yeast and as gigantic as whales and trees. Unlike most
plants, which continue to grow throughout their life, animals have a strict life-span and body plan. Although all animals start their life as relatively simple and miniscule embryos that are comparable in size, they ultimately develop bodies that are highly complex, proportionate, and symmetric. One might then wonder, how does the whale embryo know exactly how much to grow?
In 1917, in his famous book On Growth and Form, the Scottish mathematical biologist D’Arcy W. Thompson revisited the ancient idea of ‘‘universal laws of form’’, propounded by Aristotle, Greek philosopher and polymath, and studied and endorsed by the great
artist-inventor Da Vinci in his anatomical drawings, such as his famous ‘Vitruvian man’, to explain the observed forms of living organisms. Thompson not only observed the scalability of different structures across species, but also described in detail the growth patterns of different internal organs with respect to the size of the body. Although, these were interesting observations, the “How” part of it remained largely unapproachable. With the great advances in molecular cell biology, genetics, and microscopy, it is now possible to ask and, therefore, attempt to answer difficult questions regarding the mechanisms of size regulation. Given that cells are the fundamental units of life, what is their role in size determination? Do elephants have bigger cells than those of mice? The simple answer
 * Ms. Kirti Gupta, PhD Scholar from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, is pursuing her research on “Role of Myosin Vb ExonD Isoform in Compensatory Cell Size Increase in Zebrafish Periderm”. Her popular science story entitled “Sizing Up” has been selected for AWSAR Award.


























































































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