Sugar for My Honey?
The science of diabetes
Diabetes is an incurable disease that affects millions of people around the world. There is a public misconception however that a diabetic person can take some insulin and the diabetes goes away, similar to taking an aspirin for a headache. Unfortunately it is not that simple.
Most diabetics have the same problem: their bodies have difficulty handling sugar and fat, but the causes of Diabetes can be very different. At Bristol University in the Biochemical Department we are trying to understand these different causes.
There is a huge effort worldwide to understand the causes and effects of diabetes, as well as how the cells of non-
diabetic people work. When a normal cell is stimulated by insulin, a complicated communication network is started within the cell. One aspect of the work in the Biochemistry Department is to understand the separate pieces of this communication network. We are particularly interested in how the cells take up sugar. To do this we are studying special protein molecules in fat cells which act like taxis taking sugar into the cell. You can watch these taxis picking up the sugar molecules in this movie clip. We have been able to ??light up?? these molecules by attaching them to special fluorescent markers.
These fluorescent markers come in handy when we want to look at how insulin effects the behaviour of the taxi proteins and how insulin treatment helps diabetics to take up sugar into their cells. You can see this here.
Tissue culture image courtesy of Kenny Webster
Submitted by: Kenny Webster, 16 July 2003
