Symposium: Stress - Is it More Than a Disease? A Comparative Look at Stress and Adaptation, to be held January 3-7, 2001, Chicago, IL

Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX

Investigators

Abstract

The nervous and endocrine systems play a critical role in allowing organisms to cope with environmental stressors. Recent studies on non-mammalian species have identified responses to stress that have adaptive features that do not fit readily into current views, largely based on laboratory animals, that stress is a disorder. This symposium brings together for the first time scientists specifically working on chemical signaling during stress in mammalian and non-mammalian animals. The symposium will cover the phylogenetic diversity of the stress response in invertebrates and vertebrates, the comparative aspects of how mechanisms for responses show specific adaptations, and the integration of how stress responses function in development, reproduction, immune function, and behavior. The symposium itself takes an integrative approach from molecules to behavior, over a wide range of organisms, and is a satellite meeting to the similarly broad Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology. Papers will be presented by graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, as well as senior researchers, and the proceedings will be published an international journal. This symposium will have an impact by giving a unique perspective on a topic of broad interest to animal physiology as well as to neuroscience and behavior, and the exposure of young scientists to these ideas and to interactions with leaders in the field will have an impact on their careers.