The New Microscopy: Novel Characters and the Importance of Morphology in Phylogenetic Analysis, January 4-8, 2005, San Diego, California

Society For Integrative And Comparative Biology, Herndon VA

Investigators

Abstract

We are requesting funding to conduct a symposium on "The New Microscopy: New Characters and the Importance of Morphology in Phylogenetic Analysis," at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) and American Microscopical Society (AMS) in San Diego, California, January 4-8, 2005. Recently, microscopy, especially confocal laser scanning microscopy, has been used with immunofluorescent - targeted tissues and cells to visualize the internal morphology of whole organisms. These techniques have dramatically increased the amount of relevant data for studying new characters for metazoan phylogeny. Many of these characters have come to light because of a productive marriage of classical morphology and modern molecular biology in immunocytochemical studies of the nervous system, musculature, and tracing of cell lineages during embryological development. Because research centered on the phenotype of metazoans is still relevant in the age of molecular sequencing the symposium will emphasize the importance of morphological data in phylogenetic analysis and will present recent examples of studies showing how morphological evidence is playing a key role in the reconstruction of metazoan history.