NEW SCIENTIFIC ENDEAVORS

So, College...

It’s all so new, interesting, hard and busy. Classes aren't as bad as I thought they'd be, but I wouldn't say they're easy either. Amongst all my classes, there is this one course that just blows me away. It is a first year studies course (FIYS) called "Making sense of Aging". 

This course, like any other first year studies course; is created to introduce students into the college way of studying and writing. We get a lot of reading assignments every other day, and a writing component. Like the title of the course suggests, we try to make sense of the process of aging in different organisms including human beings.

So far we have read a lot of peer reviewed articles about researches conducted about the topic. We have read books by Mark Benecke- a German Forensic Biologist, and a lot of other scientist exploring ways in which some organisms have managed to keep from showing signs of Senescence while other keep aging and dying.

Recently we read an article about the research on aging done on Caenorhabditis elegans or C-elegans. Basically these worms have developed a strong stress resistance system that allows them to live longer by skipping a stage in their life cycle. In stage L1, the C-elegans larvae, provided extreme situations such as overcrowding or food scarcity; go through a Dauer stage of growth instead of L2 till adult worm.

This stage allows C-elegans larvae (now called Deuer) to save a lot of energy and storing fat by not eating and not moving as much as they would in L2 stage. It is at this stage that the larva resists factors that would be detrimental to normal growing larvae, such as food scarcity, high temperatures, overcrowding etc.

It has been found that C-elegans that go through the Dauer stage live longer than those who don’t. This is through other more complex genomic activities that accompany the Dauer stage. Genomic information that is stopped or initiated to make little changes in cell activities that enable these worms to live much longer than their "wild type" partners. These genomic materials have an equivalent in human beings....Which I will address in my next post.

Thanks ya’ll…