This grant application is for partial support for the Ninth International Conference on Second Messengers and Phosphoproteins to be held in October 27-November 1, 1995 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. The 1995 Conference is subtitled """"""""Signal Transduction in Health and Disease"""""""". This triennial conference has been ongoing since 1971, and has been one of the most subscribed and successful conferences devoted to signal transduction. The facilities reserved for the present conference are excellent. The main purpose is to assemble investigators to discuss the current progress and lay groundwork for new directions in this field, which is of primary interest to biochemists, pharmacologists, cell biologists, molecular biologists and physiologists. The conference is multi-disciplinary in nature since signal transduction is involved in most cell processes and is linked to various disease states, but there will be a particularly strong focus this year on diabetes (insulin receptor, cAMP pathway, ion channels) and cancer (growth factors, tyrosine phosphorylation, SH2 domains). Second messengers and phosphoproteins will be addressed at the organ system, tissue, cellular, subcellular and molecular levels. The investigators in this field are held together mainly by similarities in the signal pathways, which are brought about in large part by their evolutionary relatedness. The conference will be composed of eight half-day symposium sessions which include three Distinguished Lectures by Nobel laureates Dr. Stanley Cohen, Dr. Edwin Krebs, and Dr. Alfred Gilman. The remaining 32 symposium speakers, who have already been confirmed, are international leaders in their respective fields. The symposia will be divided into sessions on growth factors and tyrosine protein kinases; MAP kinases, Fos/Jun, gene regulation; special signaling systems; protein phosphatases and metabolic pathways; calcium and ion channels; cyclic AMP and cyclic GMP; receptors and G proteins. Young scientists will be invited to submit their work in abstracts to be published in a Conference booklet. Those considered from abstracts to be outstanding will be selected for short oral presentations in the evening workshop sessions and the remainder will be presented in poster sessions. Approximately 30 workshop sessions will be held in the evenings. Proceedings from the conference will be published by Raven Press as a volume of the series Advances in Second Messengers and Phosphoproteins. The response to previous conferences has been excellent with approximately 900 participants for each of the last two conferences in Kobe, Japan and Glasgow, Scotland. The organizers are committed to make the 1995 conference the best yet and it is deserving of consideration for partial support.
