The "Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) Symposium on Integrative Biology of Sensory Hair Cells" will take place January 6, 2018 at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis Hotel in San Francisco, California. This meeting will focus on hair cells, which are found in invertebrate aquatic animals, in the grooves in the skin (called the lateral line system) of fish and larval amphibians, and in the inner ear of adult amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. These small cells respond to water vibration and sound, and are also vital for orientation relative to gravity, acceleration, and fluid motion detection. In humans, they are necessary for hearing and for vestibular function, and developmental defects or later loss of function in these cells are the major cause of deafness, impairments of postural stability, and of the ability to stand or walk. Despite much recent research progress on hair cell biology in invertebrate animals and in the auditory, vestibular, and lateral line systems of vertebrate animals, hair cell researchers working in those different systems tend not interact with each other, and therefore overlook major new research developments. This meeting is both timely and important, and two expected outcomes are (1) the broad dissemination of new information to biology teaching faculty and their graduate and undergraduate students, all of whom are the main attendees of the SICB conference, and (2) the formation of new scientific collaborations that will lead to novel approaches to the fundamental questions of hair cell evolution, development, physiology, and regeneration.
Hair cells are responsible for mechano-transduction, hearing and vestibular function in a variety of invertebrate and vertebrate animals. This symposium brings together researchers who study hair cells in a variety of organ systems (invertebrate outer body, cochlear, vestibular, and lateral line systems) and who utilize a variety of experimental approaches (including molecular developmental analysis, perturbation of gene expression, and electrophysiology, to name a few), with the goal of initiating a major interdisciplinary conversation and exchange of ideas about hair cell function, development and evolution. For example, the discovery of sensory hair cells in ascidian tunicates, a non-vertebrate chordate, has fostered important evolutionary-developmental studies that have illuminated common features with the development hair cells in cranial placodes in vertebrates. In vertebrate animals, cochlear and vestibular hair cells are derived from the otic placode, while hair cells of the lateral line system are derived from lateral line placodes. Molecular analysis of the genes required for hair cell development and differentiation in these different contexts is ongoing, as are efforts to identify the ion channel or channels responsible for mechano-electrical transduction by hair cells in the inner ear. It is thus a highly opportune time to bring researchers from these different communities together with the joint purposes of broadly disseminating new information about hair cells to biology teaching faculty and their graduate and undergraduate students, all of whom are the main attendees of the SICB conference, and fostering new scientific collaborations that will lead to novel approaches to the fundamental questions of hair cell evolution, development, physiology, and regeneration.
