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Extracellular vesicles and why I love them (Part 1)

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 Sometimes, small is big  Fig: biogenesis of extracellular vesicles in the three domains of life. Vesicle budding indicated with arrows. (a) TEM showing hypervesiculation in the bacterium S. typhimurium. Image kindly provided by Mario F. Feldman (University of Alberta, Canada). (b) SEM showing microvesicles budding from the eukaryote Leishmania donovani. Image reprinted from Silverman et al. (2008). (c) Cryo-TEM of vesicle budding from the archaeon T. kodakaerensis. The protrusion of the S layer can also be observed clearly. (d) TEM of ultrathin cell sections of vesicle budding from T. kodakaerensis. Figures (c) and (d) provided by the authors (Gill, S., Catchpole, R. and Forterre, P., 2019. Extracellular membrane vesicles in the three domains of life and beyond. FEMS microbiology reviews, 43(3), pp.273-303.) I first encountered the term “extracellular vesicles” during a cell biology lecture wherein the lecturer droned on from Alberts, about various organelles being present inside the
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The Modern Mute

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Image: A digital artwork from my archive There are silent moments of speculation and wonderment that sift through my mind at its quietest, some pass through the complex maze of thoughts, others either push out shards of creativity and tranquillity or sink me deeper with melancholic musings. Simple observations of mundane details, peculiar questions, strange habits, lost feelings, and oddities all filed away in the crevices of my mind often resembling an antique shop and this week’s addition to the assortment of ‘items’ would be me questioning the power of words.  In a generation that relies on highly digitized platforms claiming to have ‘hacks’ to successfully communicating, I wonder how much of actual human communication much less with words remain in the world.  Why use words when one can easily express the same with emoticons or emojis or e-stickers? Having my own collection of choice stickers and emojis, I too indulge in the modern yet lackadaisical form of communication and co
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The Overthinking Oddity

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  Image: An excerpt from a conversation with a friend A cursory Google search will tell you that anxiety is your body’s response to stress and overthinking a mere side effect or symptom — a statement that may seem astute for your average reader but churlish for someone with the disorder. An entire disorder watered down more than a tall glass of squash for easy understanding or lack thereof. Of the many things that one has learned to normalize in our modern world, awareness about patient dealing with people with such mental health issues haven’t seem to have made the list yet and is still viewed with notoriety instead of reciprocating kindness.  A generation of sufferers focusing too much on the optics of being imperfect social preachers but never owning up to their faults or working on their flaws. WE are a generation obsessed with the idea of positive change yet never having the will or courage to work out the kinks in ourselves and instead choose to live oblivious lives blanketed in
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Ethics: Mankind's obsolete currency

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  Image Credit:  David Teniers the Younger,  Monkeys in school  Imagine a world without ethics; a world without the weight of the metaphysical morals weighing on our conscience; a world where the repercussions of our actions equate to only fulfilling our needs, with anarchy and acquisitive forces drive the society.   A true dystopian nightmare shearing and pulverizing humanity and with itself the animal kingdom, the ecosystems and the planet. The discourse on ethics often stems from a fundamental understanding of reason; whether a particular set of actions is practical or idealistic or feasible in a given situation often influences the course of ethical action being taken. Eminent 18 th Century philosopher, Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative binds us to our desires with a sense of moral duty regardless of our desires; a thought experiment that eventually evolved into what a layman would call ‘ethics’. A similar take on moral duty and obligation can be seen in the works of Peter Un
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Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright

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Picture Courtesy: Rumna Mukherjee   My first experience with wildlife was through the pages of a book, ‘The Man Eaters of Kumaon’ written by the eminent hunter, writer and naturalist, Jim Corbett. A second hand, hard-bound with yellowing pages that still remains nestled in my bookshelf, passed down by my father during one such summer vacation as an attempt to make me read anything other than the Harry Potter books. The mesmerizing, tranquil beauty of Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal and the gripping adventures with a tinge of mystique and suspense made an inexplicable narrative for a child who had only witnessed these magnificent feral cats as emancipated and indolent beings in various Zoological Parks over the years.   The vibrant cover image of a feral tiger, our national animal, in its very element, dredging up goosebumps is what I then longed to experience in reality— an opportunity to witness these glorious and feral felines in the pristine wild. In 2015, the opportunity presented it
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A binding tale of dogs, humans and a virus

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  Picture Courtesy: Swagatama Mukherjee Modeled after a soldier’s canvas gown, the image of the Plague doctor, from 17 th Century France & Italy comes to mind during a discourse on fatal zoonotic diseases— a wisp of a shadow of the true carnage caused by elusive microscopic viruses and their infected hosts. Many zoonotic diseases have notoriously plagued and infected various humans and animals since decades. Zoonotic Influenza, Plague, Lyme disease and many more have individually recorded high mortality rates contributing to a sense of paranoia and general fear of stray animals especially bovines, rodents, stray felines and canines. A perspicuous paranoia and fear, keeping us on our toes so as to not contract a possibly deadly disease but often resulting in forming a warped outlook towards these very animals by viewing them all as vicious and feral is something we are familiar with as a society. A very common occurrence of this thought can be seen in the case of dogs who are conti
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Cacotopia for Chickens

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  Picture Credits: Wikimedia Commons “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”, an excerpt from a timeless work of literature, The Animal Farm by George Orwell stands as a juxtaposed reflection of a dystopian world with rebel animals and tortured humans in a unique twist of fate. With humans amounting for a huge section of consumers in food chain; acting on our god complex, we often feel the need to decide the fate of other species with respect to which gets eaten and which doesn’t with no regard to their suffrage. Our evolution dictates that the pattern of consumption has since the very beginning revolved around sustenance, ease and availability of food as prehistoric humans are
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