CONFERENCE: Symposia in Evolutionary Developmental Biology, to be held January 4-8, 2000, Atlanta, GA

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This proposal's funding makes possible a unique meeting of scientists doing interdisciplinary work in Evolutionary and Developmental Biology. This will happen at the Society for Integrative Biology's (SICB) Annual Meeting in Atlanta, GA on January 4-8, 2000. At these meetings, a new Division will be formed within SICB, a division for Developmental Evolutionary Biology, the first interdisciplinary scientific group of its kind in the world. The money received from NSF will allow two related symposia to take place at these historic meetings. The first will be an overview and history of comparative embryology over the past century. Comparative embryologists were the first scientists to examine the link between evolution and development. The second will be a symposium examining the role of a special group of genes, the HOX gene complex, in determining body plans in all animals during embryonic development. It is through the process of embryonic development that a unique organism is made, through the interaction of the genome with special factors within the egg. As genome projects continue to elucidate the DNA sequences in the fly, worm and human genomes, we can begin to study how these genomes are expressed during embryonic development in a carefully orchestrated fashion in time and space. This new discipline of Developmental Evolutionary Biology has emerged to examine how different organisms are generated with a similar set of genes, because we know now that all animals use the same kinds of genes during embryonic development. The combination of the historical overview examining the foundations of this interdisciplinary thought and the presence of the top Evo-Devo researchers in the field at the meeting promises to highlight this new discipline and the extraordinary promise that it shows in understanding how body plans are made during development.