Many sub-disciplines of biology have reached a state that calls for integration and consolidation of existing approaches, terminology, and knowledge as well as more efficient and wide-spread utilization of modern technologies to enable fundamentally new insight into principles of organismal biology. The goal of this workshop is to explore and devise future strategies for revealing and explaining fundamental principles that determine interactions between organisms and their environment and to bridge the gap between divergent sub-disciplines of organismal biology. To achieve this goal the workshop will bring together scientists who normally do not interact routinely but represent traditionally divergent sub-disciplines of biology. The common denominator of this workshop will be that all of those scientists are leaders in one or more aspects of organismal biology with emphasis on the study of how organisms interact with the environment. Gaining a broad perspective and input from such a diverse group of scientists is critical for assessing the current state of the science of organism-environment interactions and for launching a creative and ground-breaking dialogue about the tools and mechanisms that would be most efficient to move the field forward. Workshop participants will identify emerging themes and opportunities for progress vital to addressing fundamental questions pertaining to principles of organism interactions with the environment. The workshop will identify avenues that will facilitate productive interactions among a broad array of investigators studying responses of a large number of species to the environment. The goal of those interactions is the development of well-coordinated community-based scientific research and training efforts that will lead to breakthroughs in understanding the biology of organisms. A fresh and more coherent, well-integrated outlook on organismal biology, which incorporates key concepts of modern systems biology, will likely change the way biology is taught at all levels ranging from K12 to graduate education. This would be achieved by providing a framework of knowledge and approaches that can serve as the glue for tying together seemingly disparate details and facts elucidated by modern biological research into a common whole that students can relate to from an intuitive perspective.
A workshop was organized and held in Arlington, VA, on Sep 18-20, 2011. The specific objective was to bring together experts in diverse subdisciplines of Organismal Biology to develop recommendations for most effective future development of this area of science. The workshop identified that biology would benefit from a renewed focus on whole organisms (in addition to focusing on specific genes). Because whole organism bioloy is highly interdisciplinary expertise from many fields is required in a modern research program in this area. To attain such expertise significant community development, student training programs, and infrastructure support are necessary. New tools and intellectual concepts for studying the diversity of life, including differences among individuals of the same specie, need to be deployed in this field. The role of environmental exposures, and the interaction between development and the environment need to be integrated more effectively at the level of whole organisms. To achieve these goals miniaturized animal tracking technologies, and technolgies for capturing intricate differences in appearance and function of organisms are needed. Future studies of whole organisms will take advantage of such technologies to achieve a very high spatial and temporal resolution in describing organisms. Such high-resolution data are necessary to evaluate the relative contributions of genes and the environment on the appearance and function of individuals. They will allow dissection of the mechanisms that give rise to differences in apearance and function (including susceptibility to complex diseases and behavioral traits) of individuals.
