Coordinator: Dr. Sonali Raje
20Mon
Coordinator: Dr. P. K. Joshi
28Tue
Coordinator: Dr. Pravin Pathak
30Thu
Coordinator: Shri V. C. Sonawane
30Thu
Coordinator: Prof. Jyotsna Vijapurkar
Dr. Deepti Gupta, HBCSE
In the age of personal gadgets streaming into our sleep time, the Nobel prize for research on the body’s clock, or circadian rhythms, could hardly be more timely. First identified in fruit flies, the tiny molecular components of the clock are at work in all multicellular life including humans. Circadian rhythms control when we’re relatively more active physically and mentally each day, keeping our lives ticking in time with Earth’s day/night cycle. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three American scientists, Jeffrey Hall and Michael Rosbash of Brandeis University and Michael Young of Rockefeller University, for their almost fifty years of work, on how time is measured each day in biological systems. The internal body clock allows an organism to anticipate the rising and setting of the sun, rather than simply reacting to it. The de-synchronizing of the body clock with the solar day cycle has now been linked to metabolic disorders, cancers, problems in cognition, Alzheimer's and several other issues in humans. The research on the other hand has informed policy makers to allow for appropriate actions such as desirable working hours (daylight saving) or the suitable time to learn for adolescents. It has also fostered the growth of a new field of research : “Chronomedicineâ€, which deals with prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases in humans with a particular focus on the role "time" plays in our physiology, endocrinology, metabolism and behavior at many organizational levels.