The physiology of mammalian feeding has proven to be a fertile ground for research amongst experimental biologists. Over the last 40 years, researchers have been particularly interested in understanding the physiology and functional anatomy of two behaviors that distinguish mammals from other vertebrates: suckling and chewing. In this symposium, experts on mammalian feeding physiology will highlight a newly developed database, the Feeding Experiments End-User Database (F.E.E.D.), through presentations of comparative and functional analysis of suckling and chewing between and within the major groups of mammals. Some of the presentations will also highlight the major gaps in our understanding of mammalian feeding physiology, with an eye toward generating new research avenues and approaches in the field. F.E.E.D. was developed as a means of storing and sharing physiological data to promote collaborations across labs and support meta-analysis of mammalian feeding physiology. Presentations in the symposium will include data that will be made available in F.E.E.D. from the major research labs around the world. As access to the database will ultimately be made available to other researchers and the general public, a major goal of the symposium is to promote the use of F.E.E.D. We will also solicit feedback on database functionality and the potential for expansion to include other vertebrate groups. Additional broader impacts of this work include training of graduate students and post-doctoral associates, some of which are co-authors on talks or presenters in the symposium.
This grant supported participation of researchers (faculty, post-doctoral and graduate student) in a symposium held at the Annual Meeting for the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in January, 2011. This symposium was titled "Synthesis of Physiologic Data from the Mammalian Feeding Apparatus using FEED, the Feeding Experiments End-User Database" and featured integrative and synthetic studies from many of the top comparative functional morphology and experimental physiology labs studying the evolution of mammalian feeding. Topics covered in the symposium included: 1) overview of the data archiving method for mammalian feeding physiology data; 2) the evolution of muscle activity patterns driving jaw and hyoid movements during feeding;3) comparative and evolutionary anatomy of mammalian jaw muscles; 4) the correlated evolution of mammalian chewing muscle activity patterns; 5) the correlated evolution of chewing muscle activity and jaw morphology; 6) the development and physiology of mammalian feeding; 7) the evolution of chewing muscle activity patterns in marsupials; 8) the effects of chewing on skull loading; 9) variation in jaw kinematics during feeding. In addition to producing integrative and comparative scientific works, another main goal of the symposium was to highlight the NSF-funded and publically available Feeding Experiments End-User Database, which has been developed by symposium participants and others to archive and make publically accessible existing and future data on mammalian feeding physiology. Many of the talks utilized data from labs that have committed data to this database. In addition to some of the senior researchers in the field, 4 of the talks were given by post-doctoral associates (two minority, two female), and 3 of the talks featured collaborations with graduate students. All 11 symposium talks were published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology (Volume 51, issue 2, August, 2011).
