Page 60 - AWSAR 2.0

36 || AWSAR Awarded Popular Science Stories - 2019
The Victory of Good over Evil: A Cellular Ramayana
Dr Himanshi Kapoor*
Email: himanshi.kapoor28@gmail.com
Communication is the key to sustain and evolve since time immemorial. The current world population is around
7.7 billion, out of which roughly 0.1% are researchers. Research is a very amusing career wherein we think and experiment to logically improve the quality of life on the earth and beyond. It becomes a thing of utmost importance that we explain our findings to the layman so that they can understand and use the knowledge pool on a day-to-day basis. In an attempt to bridge this gap, we present our story.
Every story has a protagonist, and for us, it is the MITOCHONDRION, popularly known as MITOCHONDRIA in plural form. Cells are the basic functional and structural units of an organism. To function well, they are helped by
a lot of assistants known as the organelles, and mitochondria are one of them. Let us imagine a class full of cellular organelles, where the monitor of that class is the nucleus, which controlsmostofthecellularfunctions,andthe topper of that class is the mitochondrion, being the smartest in terms of its functions. There is no doubt about the might of the mitochondrion, as, since childhood, we have been fed with the one-liner ‘mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell’, just like the powerhouses, which generate electricity (a form of energy) using coal, moving water, wind or other fuel sources. The mitochondria produce energy in the body using the food we eat and the oxygen we breathe. Apart from the energy, they also help the cells to grow and divide. A body without functional mitochondria is like the earth without
* Dr Himanshi Kapoor, Post Doctoral Fellow from CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi, is pursuing her research on “Nuclear Mitochondrial Cross-Talk”. Her popular science story entitled “The Victory of Good over Evil: A Cellular Ramayana” has been selected for AWSAR Award.