This application requests support for an international meeting, Development and homeostasis of skeletal muscle in health and disease, which is part of the Frontiers in Myogenesis series sponsored by the Society for Muscle Biology. This conference series has been held triennially with great success for more than 20 years. This specific meeting will be held from June 6-11, 2016 at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California. We expect approximately 300 participants from around the world. This conference is timely and significant for three reasons: First, although great strides have been made in understanding how muscle forms during early development, much remains to be learned about the mechanisms that govern muscle homeostasis, ensuring that muscle responds to injury and disease and adapts to functional demands during adult life and normal aging, when muscle mass and function is reduced. This meeting will focus upon new developments and directions in studying muscle homeostasis. Second, this meeting will cover several exciting new themes, three mentioned here, that have not been covered in depth during previous muscle conferences. There is an increasing appreciation that muscle can function as an endocrine organ and provide signals, myokines, which govern differentiation and function of multiple organs. This new awareness will be an important theme of this meeting; we have dedicated one session to this topic and expect participation from scientists who are new to the muscle field. Likewise, there is an increasing appreciation that immune cells have a critical role in muscle regeneration, and we have planned for a session that will include immunologists and recent converts to muscle biology. Finally, muscle spindles are critical for proprioception and represent a hybrid muscle cell type designed as a sensory and motor organ. The development of this critical muscle cell type requires sensory innervation, and we have planned for a session that will cover the mechanisms that govern their formation and maintenance and how muscle spindles control motor movement. Third, we plan for a session that will cover exciting new developments in studying myopathies and strategies for treating these diseases. As usual, we will include muscular dystrophy, but we also plan for talks on spinal muscular atrophy, congenital myasthenia and myasthenia gravis. This diversity of topics will not only serve to educate scientists about diseases with which they may be unfamiliar but also highlight cutting- edge new strategies for treating these diseases. The meeting will also cover important, traditional topics, including the biology of muscle satellite cells, mechanisms of muscle degeneration and regeneration, muscle specification and differentiation, myoblast fusion, and muscle cell architecture including nuclear and mitochondrial positioning.
This meeting will provide a unique platform to stimulate cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration among basic and clinical scientists to further spur new advances and discoveries which can help in the understanding of development and homeostasis of skeletal muscle in health and in disease. Leading scientists will lecture about emerging areas such as: the newly identified endocrine role of muscle secreted factors (myokines), which regulate the physiology of multiple tissues; the mechanisms underlying the loss of muscle with age (sarcopenia); the intersection between muscle and neural and connective tissue; the cellular and developmental processes that regulate muscle formation (myogenesis) during development and in response to injury or disease. This meeting will provide the synergy to enable significant discoveries in muscle development, disease and therapies.
