Genomic Perspectives in Comparative Physiology of Mollusks: Integration across Disciplines

University Of Iowa, Iowa City IA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will support a symposium, “Genomic Perspectives in Comparative Physiology of Mollusks: Integration across Disciplines” that will take place at The Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB)'s annual meeting on January 4, 2021 in Washington, D.C, USA. The symposium speakers will all highlight mollusks as a powerful means of linking genome to phenotype - a critical unanswered question in biology. This symposium will bring together a diverse set of biologists from across career stages and institutions and from the biomedical sciences to ecology to address this theme. The symposium activities are designed to encourage engagement and catalyze collaborations. In particular, the symposium will use an interdisciplinary and interactive model that will provide meaningful professional and scientific development opportunities for junior scientists. Mapping genotype to phenotype remains one of the biggest challenges in biology. A mechanistic understanding of the genetic basis of these responses is also critically important to forecast how living systems will respond to rapidly changing environments, which represents an urgent challenge for biologists. This symposium will use an interest in mollusks as a common currency to link biologists in otherwise quite disparate fields (e.g., biomedicine, physiology, ecology). The symposium consists of 11 presentations representing a broad range of efforts to integrate large datasets across levels of biological organization in mollusks, towards the larger goal of linking genome to phenome - one of the Grand Challenges identified by NSF. Presentations, discussions and syntheses will focus on topics that include overviews of the biological and genomic diversity of molluscan life, technological progress towards highly contiguous molluscan genomes, challenges in assembling molluscan genomes, and how genome-scale processes underpin organismal physiology and ecological and evolutionary processes over multiple spatiotemporal scales. Meetings focused on organismal groups traditionally emphasize systematics and taxonomy or the intricacies of organismal biology. The symposium will explicitly take a broader and more integrative perspective, applying new insights and developments from bioinformatics and genomics to solve important biological questions and address health and economic issues that directly impact humans. This award was cofunded by the Integrative Ecological Physiology and the Physiological Mechanisms and Biomechanics Programs in the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems in Directorate for Biological Science. 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.