An international symposium on the topic of Sensory Transduction will by held in September of 1991 at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, under the auspices of the Society of General Physiologists. This Symposium will focus on the molecular mechanisms of sensory transduction, dealing with initial events of transduction, from reception of the physical stimulus to generation of the receptor potential. While covering several different sensory systems, the Symposium will have a conceptual center in the issues of stimulus sensitivity, discrimination, amplification, and adaptation. Five lecture sessions will be organized by sensory modality: Olfaction, Photoreception, Proprioception and Special Senses, Taste, and Auditory Transduction. For any one sense, significant progress necessarily requires a a spectrum of scientific methodologies, and so the symposium will draw a multidisciplinary group of speakers and participants. Thus, within each ssion, speakers will represent a variety of approaches to understanding the molecular events in ransduction, including molecular cloning, protein chemistry, cell biology, electrophysiology, biophysics, video microscopy, and ultrastructural morphology. Eighteen speakers, including five from other countries, have been invited and most have accepted at this time. Poster sessions for contributed papers will be held on two afternoons, and will draw a similar diversity of approaches to the common issue of transduction. The Symposium is fortunate in having Denis Baylor and A. James Hudspeth, two outstanding leaders in the field, to deliver Keynote Addresses. The published proceedings from the Symposium are expected to make an important contribution to this expanding field. With a committed distribution of more than 1800 volumes, the proceedings will be a compendium of exemplary research that will help shape research directions in future years.
