February 17, 2019 Sunday
Bedtime Story
Cell Death Studies
Once the ischemic cascade is initiated it
is as if the organism does not consider it worthwhile investing its precious
resources in salvaging the cells that have been triggered.
It must be stressed that one needs to
differentiate a cell dying from necrosis with cell death due to apoptosis.
Apoptosis, simply put, is a neat way of
cell death that is programmed and is not accompanied with tissue-destructive
inflammation.
Necrosis, on the other hand, is caused by
forces external to cell such as infection, trauma or toxins and is accompanied
with inflammatory response.
My laboratory research work at University
of Irvine between the period of July 2008 and June 2010 to a large extent was
based on this cascade of events that accompany cellular death.
Our lab’s prime focus was to study and
grade the of effect of known toxins, unstudied chemicals and dyes used in
retinal surgeries on retinal cells such as Müller Cells (a type of supportive
glial cells), retinal pigment epithelial cells (cells that nourish the
photoreceptors) and even corneal keratocytes (specialized fibroblasts residing
in the stroma of the cornea and are responsible for keeping our corneas
transparent and clear) using biomarkers specific to ischemic and apoptotic cell
death.
I did not work with photoreceptors (though
we tried to) themselves as we found out much to our agony that culturing them turned
out to be a tough task because they were far more fragile than the other cells
that we had experience with.
Cell and tissue culture is the first stage
that precedes setting up of the actual experiment.
In the case of tissue and cellular ischemia,
as we will see later, cell death can occur through either through apoptosis or
necrosis which as often happens in life is a random chance event.
Let us now see how this ischemic cascade
occurs through series of steps once the cells of the heart are deprived of
oxygenation through the obstruction of blood flow.
I may as well number the steps as I do for
most other things keeping in mind that biological processes are rather complex
taking place through extremely complex biochemistry through jiggling of
molecules in an extremely tiny enclosed space.
Biochemical reactions in our cells are probabilistic
and stochastic in nature unlike the neat and clean manner in which biochemical
cycles and reactions are described in text books.
This, I think, is often not appreciated or
undervalued by the medical students in spite of being “taught”.
Thus, to simulate cellular chemistry that
takes places in sacs of femtolitre-sized volumes packed with billions and
probably trillions of molecules fast Monte Carlo simulation algorithms are
being worked out by computer scientists.
The name “Monte Carlo” for the stochastic
Monte Carlo Method (we had come across it in the Buffon’s needle problem story)
comes from the Monte Carlo Casino.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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