Proposal Title: Developmental and Evolutionary Regulation of Fish Body Shape
A major direction of current and future biological research is to understand how multiple, interacting functional systems coordinate to produce a body that works. This understanding is complicated by the fact that organisms need to work well in multiple environments, with both predictable and unpredictable environmental perturbations. Furthermore, organismal design reflects a history of past environments and not a plan for future environments. How complex, interacting functional systems evolve, then, is a truly grand challenge. This symposium will be held to convene scientists ranging from geneticists, to physiologists, to ecologists, to engineers to facilitate the emergence of fish body shape as a model system for understanding how complex, interacting functional systems develop and evolve. Fish body shape is a complex morphology that 1) results from many, many developmental paths and 2) functions in many, many different behaviors. Understanding the regulation and coordination of the many paths from genes to body shape, body shape to function, and function to a working fish body in a dynamic environment is now possible given new technologies from genetics to engineering and new theoretical models that integrate the different levels of biological organization (from genes to ecology). By convening a diverse array of researchers and encouraging participants to think about how these fields overlap and interact, this symposium will facilitate a holistic, or systems, approach to understanding complex functional systems.
A major direction of current and future biological research is to understand how multiple, interacting functional systems coordinate to produce a body that works. The project funded a conference symposium on the interacting functional systems relevant to fish body shape. This symposium convened scientists ranging from geneticists, to physiologists, to ecologists, to engineers in order to facilitate the emergence of fish body shape as a model system for understanding how complex, interacting functional systems develop and evolve. Fish body shape is a complex morphology that 1) results from many, many developmental paths and 2) functions in many, many different behaviors. Understanding the regulation and coordination of the many paths from genes to body shape, body shape to function, and function to a working fish body in a dynamic environment is now possible given new technologies from genetics to engineering and new theoretical models that integrate the different levels of biological organization (from genes to ecology). The invited symposium participants each do work at the cutting edge of these components and presented this work in order to begin to develop a synthetic, integrative understanding of how multiple, interacting functional systems coordinate to produce a body that works. Intellectual Merit Outcome of the project included both the symposium and the publication of the symposium presentions as peer-reviewed papers in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology (Vol 50, Issue 6). Broader impacts of the project included information transfer between disparate fields (from genetics, to physiology, to engineering) and professional development of researchers at different career levels, including Ph.D. students, post-doctoral researchers, and untenured faculty.
