This award supports an international conference entitled Evolution of the First Nervous Systems II. This three day meeting will revisit a similarly titled conference held in 1989, and take place in May, 2014 at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience of the University of Florida. Speakers will cover a range of pertinent topics, with an emphasis paid to the phylogeny of basal metazoans (e.g., ctenophores and cnidarians), where nervous systems are first represented and to earlier groups (e.g., sponges) where some components of nervous systems have been identified. The meeting will address several important questions including when nervous systems first appeared in evolution, whether nervous systems emerged once, or multiple times, where the molecular tool kits that define neurons (e.g., voltage-gated ion channels, neurotransmitters and their receptors) came from and how they were harnessed to make the first neurons, and the very compelling question that underlies the whole topic of nervous system evolution, what is a neuron? The proceedings of the meeting will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology and will include a chapter that will synthesize the content of organized discussions on specific questions such as those listed above. This meeting will provide unprecedented insight into one of the most significant events in animal evolution, the appearance of the nervous system and, in doing so, provide a baseline from which to trace the evolution of nervous systems and, ultimately, the human brain. The meeting will be promoted to a global audience through on-line journals and meetings, and a strategic effort is being made by the organizers to involve undergraduate students from liberal arts colleges and minority serving institutions.
This award provided the primary funding to support an international meeting entitled "Evolution of the First Nervous Systems II" which was held in Florida in the spring of 2014. The broad goals of this meeting were to try to determine when, in phylogenetic terms, the nervous system, as we know it, first evolved and whether or not it might have done so, independently, on more than one occasion. This meeting revisited the subject matter of "Evolution of the First Nervous Systems (I)" meeting which was held in 1989. In the inteveneing 25 years there had been no meetings on this subject but, very importantly, our understanding of the phylogenetic relationships between the organisms in which nervous systems likely first evolved (i.e. the early Metazoa) has changed enormously as a result of the use of the tools of molecular phylogeny. Likewise, our understanding of the origins of the various molecules that allow nerve cells to function as they do (proteins such as ion channels and receptors and the chemicals used as neurotransmitters) has changed. This meeting was designed to apply this new understanding to see if the origins of the earliest nervous systems could be identified. The meeting included recognized experts in the phylogeny of early metazoans together with experts in the neurobiology and cell biology of the same groups of animals, other scientists, including graduate and undergraduate students interested in this topic. Inherent in any such discussion is what one means by a nervous system or, more vexing yet, how would you define the essential building block of a nervous system, the nerve cell or neuron. After much discussion the participants concluded that the most pragmatic description of a neuron was a functional one; specifically "a cell dedicated to electrical communication that targets discrete, distant cells by way of synapses with both pre- and post-synaptic elements." The proceedings of the meeting are being published in a special issue of The Joutrnal of Experimental Biology which is expected to be published in 2014. The speical issue also includes a concluding paper that summarizes the main findings of the meeting, particularly the outcomes of the organized discussions that focused on particular topics (e.g. "What is a Neuron?")
