Symposium: Comparative Gastrointestinal Endocrinology: Integration of Function

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The gastrointestinal tract is a dynamic, chemosensory endocrine organ that integrates feeding behavior, digestion, absorption, and assimilation. This proposal requests support for a one day symposium to examine how that integration is mediated by hormones. Entitled "Comparative Gastrointestinal Endocrinology: Integration of Function," the symposium will be part of the American Society for Zoologists annual meeting held in Vancouver, B.C. in December 1992. The symposium has three objectives. First, the ten speakers will examine how the separate processes they investigate contribute to the regulation of the whole digestive system. Second, examples of the hormonal control of gut function will come from animal groups ranging from mammals to insects. Third, the symposium will emphasize hormone actions, rather than gut hormone chemistry. The outcome should lead to: 1) an evaluation of the integrative roles of regulatory factors for which functions are known; 2) strategies for determining the actions of "orphaned" chemical mediators, having known structures but unknown functions; 3) knowledge of interactions between gut peptides and hormones released at sites remote from the gut; and 4) an assessment of optimal biological models in nonmammalian vertebrates and invertebrates, for simplifying regularity complexity and for constructing the phylogeny of endocrine regulation.