Meeting: Allometry, Scaling and Ontogeny of Form; A Symposium for the Annual, SICB meeting, Tampa, FL January 2019

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

The symposium "Allometry, Scaling and Ontogeny of Form" will showcase a talented and diverse group of researchers examining the developmental and evolutionary causes of morphological size and shape relationships across a variety of animals and plants. Differences in the relative sizes and shapes of body parts are among the most distinguishing features that define species, and understanding how these differences come about is of compelling interest to the study of developmental and evolutionary biology. This symposium will be held in Tampa, Florida, in January 2019, at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. The symposium will provide a platform to facilitate conversation between junior and senior career scientists and will foster novel integrative collaborations between evolutionary biologists, developmental biologists, and physiologists. The symposium will feature the state-of-the-art investigation of morphological allometry, showcasing cutting-edge tools and a diverse array of study systems. By bringing together researchers specializing in diverse species, ranging from insects to mammals and plants, with participants of diverse technical expertise and research emphases, the symposium and its publications will contribute to a deeper understanding of allometry by providing an integrative synthesis of evolutionary and developmental phenomena. The mix of attendees will allow early career people to interact closely with more senior ones, and, in particular, it will place graduate students in a position to develop professional networks and connect with potential scientific mentors. Until recently, the study of allometry was mostly descriptive, and consisted of a diversity of methods for fitting regressions to bivariate or multivariate morphometric data. During the past decade, researchers have been developing methods to extract biological information from allometric data that could be used to deduce the underlying mechanisms that gave rise to the allometry. In addition, an increasing effort has gone into understanding the kinetics of growth and the regulatory mechanisms that control growth of the body and its component parts. Although there is general agreement about the new goals for the study of allometry (understanding underlying mechanisms and how those evolve to produce different morphologies), progress is hindered by lack of coordination among the different approaches. This stems from the fact that different investigators arrived at the problem from different disciplines (genetics, cell biology, evolution, development, comparative morphology, statistics), armed with different technical and conceptual approaches. The time is now right for a rapid and coordinated push to take understanding of the causes and consequences of allometry to a wholly new level, by integrating this diverse body of information about genetic, cellular, and physiological mechanisms of growth and morphogenesis into a new research program that embraces diversity of approach. In order to do this diverse practitioners must interact with each other. That is the main purpose of the symposium: to forge new functional, conceptual, and collaborative connections among established and novice practitioners selected to represent a diversity of perspectives. Symposium papers and a synthetic overview paper will be disseminated by publication in the journal, Integrative and Comparative Biology. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.