Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Conference on Metabolic Signaling and Disease: From Cell to Organism August 13 - 17, 2013 Project Summary This application seeks support for the meeting on """"""""Metabolic Signaling and Disease: From Cell to Organism"""""""" to be held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in August 13 - 17, 2013. The meeting will assemble leaders in the field, together with junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, to discuss the latest advances in our understanding of metabolic regulation and its role in normal physiology as well as a variety of disease states ranging from obesity to cancer. Metabolic processes are required for life, and are remarkably similar from organism to organism and from cell to cell. In mammals, specific cell types use metabolic pathways in highly specialized ways to conduct their cell-specific functions. Further, the specialized function of some cell types serves to maintain metabolic homeostasis of the, multicellular organism by regulating levels of hormone and metabolite messengers in the bloodstream. Metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes result when those processes fail. At the same time, cancer is increasingly recognized as a state whereby the malignant cell proliferates by altering its fuel metabolism and ignoring metabolic signals. The meeting will cover a broad spectrum of topics ranging from regulation of metabolism in many different cell types to dysregulated metabolism in a variety of disease states. Each session will be chaired by a leading scientist in the field. Oral presentations will be given by a group of distinguished invited speakers as well as speakers selected from submitted abstracts. Selected speakers will include graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty aiming for maximal inclusion of young investigators. Of special importance are the two poster sessions, where many participants can present their work in an atmosphere conducive to informal discussion. The meeting will be of moderate size, and we expect about 250 people to attend, the vast majority of whom will be presenting a poster or talk.
Metabolic Signaling and Disease: From Cell to Organism Metabolic pathways are largely the same from cell to cell, yet cell-specific fluxes through these pathways govern cell-specific functions. Deviation from the norm, due to environmental or genetic changes, can lead to organismal metabolic imbalance as in obesity and diabetes, or to cell-autonomous imbalance as in cancer. A great challenge is to understand the control of metabolic physiology, and how this is perturbed in a disease-specific manner. To stimulate innovation and cross-disciplinary interactions related to metabolism, we propose to convene a group of outstanding basic and clinical researchers studying metabolic regulation of physiology and disease in a variety of systems, in a meeting entitled Metabolic Signaling and Disease: From Cell to Organism at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in August, 2013.
