This award will fund US and international participation in The PharmEcology Symposium: A pharmacological approach to understanding plant-herbivore interactions, held at the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology Meeting from January 3-6, 2009 in Boston, MA, USA. The symposium will bring together leaders interested in multi-disciplinary research at the interface of pharmacology and the physiological ecology of plant-herbivore interactions, termed PharmEcology. Scheduled talks and breakout sessions will identify current and novel approaches for collaborative research in three general areas: 1) The biochemical mechanisms herbivores utilize to tolerate plant chemical defenses; 2) The biological activity of plant chemical defenses; and 3) The genetic diversity associated with these two components. Understanding the biochemical and genetic mechanisms by which plants defend themselves and herbivores tolerate plant chemical defenses, will provide insight into the co-evolutionary arms race between plants and herbivores, explain foraging constraints and distribution of herbivores and reveal the mechanism of action of plant compounds. Discussions will result in submission of publication(s) in the Integrative and Comparative Biology Journal and grant proposals for future collaborative research. The symposium will provide undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral students opportunities to establish networks with national and international leaders in ecology and pharmacology. While students will be recruited from speaker's labs and a pre-symposium course on PharmEcology offered at Boise State University (Fall 2008), participation is open to all students and will be widely advertised. Finally, the symposium will promote diversity by including participants of equal gender (50% female speakers), from a wide range of career stages (undergraduate, graduate, post-docs, junior and established faculty) and from a variety of countries (Australia, Austria, Great Britain, Japan, New Zealand, Uganda and USA) and disciplines (ecology, chemistry, physiology, evolutionary and behavioral biology and pharmacology).
The "PharmEcology Symposium: A pharmacological approach to understanding plant-herbivore interactions" was held January 3-7, 2009 in Boston, MA as part of the larger Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting. The session goal was to use progress in pharmacology to formalize several testable, mechanistic hypotheses in the field of plant-herbivore interactions. Successful application of pharmacological approaches and tools into the field of plant-herbivore interactions requires communication between experts in the fields of ecology and pharmacology. The symposium helped meet this requirement. The intellectual merit of the symposium was to initiate and encourage collaborations with ecologists who possess the knowledge of plant-herbivore study systems with researchers that possess the equipment, skills and knowledge of appropriate pharmacological assays. The symposium provided an opportunity to define research at the interface of pharmacology and ecology, termed Pharm-Ecology. The new research areas focused on: 1) biochemical mechanisms in herbivores that regulate the absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion of ingested plant chemicals; 2) mechanisms of action of plant chemical defenses; and 3) genetic polymorphisms associated with these two components. There were also several broader impacts of the symposium. First, we initiated international communication between leaders in ecology and pharmacology that led to novel funding opportunities and five peer-reviewed publications in the Journal of Integrative and Comparative Biology, volume 49 (3): 267-329. In addition, the symposium exposed undergraduates, graduates and postdoctoral fellows to this integrative research area and helped them establish multi-disciplinary national and international research networks. Finally, the symposium promoted diversity through the inclusion of women (8 of 18 participants and 5 of 11 speakers), undergraduate and graduate students, post docs, junior faculty and established PIs from a variety of disciplines (ecology, physiology, chemistry, pharmacology, psychology), and countries (Australia, The Netherlands, Great Britain, Japan, New Zealand and Scotland).
