Meeting: The -omics of chemical interactions in simple extant animals ; Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, Tampa, Florida, January 3-7, 2019

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This symposium will bring together researchers from diverse backgrounds, fields, institutes and career stages to engage with each other and with conference attendees. The topic of the symposia is "Chemical responses to the biotic and abiotic environment by early diverging metazoans revealed in the post-genomic age." The interaction of speakers and topics will stimulate new insights, hypotheses and collaborations. In turn, these will enhance progress in the field. The symposium will have a SICB-hosted website that will serve as a repository for information on all aspects of the researchers and their work. A minimum of 11 peer-reviewed publications, along with supplementary data, will be published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology as major products of the symposium. The symposium has a strong commitment to advancing the careers of women in science and employment in higher education and research, as 60% of the speakers are women. A complementary session will provide a platform for early career researchers to disseminate research related to the theme of the symposium. The symposium will lead to development of resources that will be available to students and researchers for many years to come. Extant early-diverging metazoans (Cnidaria, Ctenophora, Placozoa, and Porifera) have survived in a changing and increasingly complex world, and -omics data are providing novel insights on a diversity of peptides and small molecules that these animals deploy. It is clear that surprisingly sophisticated gene repertoires enable basal metazoans to encode many of the signaling, sensory, defensive and offensive capacities associated with "higher" animals. It is now timely to consider how omics methods can be used to resolve how environmental and chemical queues shape phenotypes among the basal metazoans by focusing on how these simple animals have evolved a diversity of chemical responses to environmental stimuli. The aim of this symposium is to develop a post-genomic view on the form, functions and origins of compounds that are biosynthesized in early diverging metazoans in response to environmental cues. Invited speakers will contribute talks in three general areas: 1) the molecular basis of perception, 2) chemicals deployed to deal with the biotic and abiotic environment, and 3) the molecular cross-talk that characterizes intimate interactions of hosts, parasites and symbionts. Specific topics that will be considered include: toxin diversity, life styles and co-option of chemicals, immune molecules, the chemistry of cellular reception, and sensory complexity in simple animals. The topics of this symposium and resulting interactions of speakers will contribute to a growing picture of comparative functional biochemistry, revealing how chemical mediators have enabled persistence and diversification of simple animals that lack sophisticated morphologies, anatomies and behaviors over geological time.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.