Monthly Archives: October 2010

Pat on the back

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It was a month of awards recognising some of the brightest stars of Indian science.

First up was India government’s coveted Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award instituted in the name of the founder Director of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR). Apart from the many scientific laurels it hailed, this time around the awards showcased a novel trend — three among the nine awardees were women. This was the first time ever that so many women were chosen for the award. It does reflect the growing presence of women and their being able to devote more time and energy to science than ever before. The awardees were: Sanjeev Galande, Shubha Tole (biological sciences); Swapan K Pati, Sandeep Verma (chemical sciences); G K Ananthasuresh, Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay (engineering sciences); Mitali Mukerji (medical sciences); Umesh Vasudeo Waghmare and Kalobaran Maiti (physical sciences). The award carried a cash prize of Rs five lakh, a citation and a plaque.

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The galaxy of star scientists.

A wonderful private endeavour to honour leaders in Indian science came later in the month from India’s software company Infosys. The group announced awards worth Rs 50 lakh each for six leading researchers of the country working in and out of India. The awardees — Chandrashekhar Khare (mathematical sciences), Sandip Trivedi (physical sciences), Ashutosh Sharma (engineering and computer sciences), Chetan E. Chitnis (life sciences), Amita Baviskar & Nandini Sundar (social sciences) — are from various fields of research including social sciences.

These are promising times for Indian science with these lists featuring so many young researchers.

Big fat studies

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As Body Volume Index (BVI) takes the place of dear old Body Mass Index (BMI) to become the new accepted measure of general adiposity and obesity, textbooks will hopefully be re-written and fitness experts sensitised to the ‘gold standard’.

It appears more scientific to be able to determine the difference between muscle and fat in the body to assess how obese or not a person is. This is what BVI does as opposed to BMI, which is a measure of body weight based on a person’s weight and height. BVI also takes into account body shape determining exactly where weight is distributed across the body.

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© Getty Images

Parallely, two interesting studies in Nature Genetics this week look at new genomic regions associated with and sex-specific differences occuring in obesity. The first — a meta-analysis of 46 genome-wide association studies for BMI — identified 18 genomic regions newly associated with BMI, and confirmed 14 previously associated regions. This study highlights the role for neuronal regulators of energy balance in weight regulation.

The second — a meta-analysis of 32 genome-wide association studies for waist-hip ratio (WHR) — a measure of body fat distribution — identified 13 genomic regions newly associated with WHR. Seven of these associations show a stronger effect in women, highlighting sex specific differences.

A whole set of new genes associated with body fat distribution and obesity have been identified in these studies and that includes the largest study yet of DNA variation across our genomes involving almost ¼ million people.

Variations in DNA sequence in these genetic regions can actually be linked to whether we are apple-shaped or pear-shaped, the researchers say. A good lot of these variations have a markedly stronger effect in women than in men.

Another noteworthy aspect of these findings is that many genetic regions for WHR have been found to be independent of BMI. Genetics seems to be pointing us to biological distinctions between two components of the regulation of weight – how much we eat, and how and where calories are stored as fat.

Such fat news for a week that will see a lot of happy eating and bingeing in India, what with the festival season right ahead! Not everything can be dictated by your genes, shall we say?