2005 (Oculomotor System Biology) Gordon Conference

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): After more than 35 years of behavioral and single unit studies in awake, behaving animals, the oculomotor system is arguably the best understood of the skeletomotor control systems. Traditionally, scientists have investigated the five oculomotor subsystems in isolation. Only recently has there been a push to pursue system-wide integration. Moreover, the field has begun to utilize imaging techniques, non-primate models (mouse, zebrafish), and molecular genetics approaches to generate a truly multidisciplinary view of the oculomotor system in health and disease. This proposal requests support for a conference designed to bring together scientists and physicians in this mature field to take a fresh look at how the diverse components of the oculomotor system interact and to stimulate increased interdisciplinary research. The emphasis of the conference will be upon five major emerging topics. First, rapidly evolving concepts of orbit and extraocular muscle biology require both re-examination and reinterpretation of known neural signals and existing system models. Second, oculomotor subsystems do not operate in isolation; the conference will be structured to feature important new data on the interactions between saccadic and vergence systems and between eye and head movement systems. Third, recent modeling efforts and in vitro experiments have questioned and thereby require re-examination of the accepted mechanisms of sensorimotor integration formulated from studies in awake, behaving animals. Fourth, while the coding of sensorimotor interactions and the coordinate frames for this coding have long been studied, research into the mechanisms of polysensory interactions and target selection has reached an important new level that will be highlighted by the conference. Finally, new strategies to understand oculomotor function and dysfunction using molecular genetics and model organisms are evolving and must be integrated into traditional views of oculomotor biology. Hence, we seek to bring together ideas and investigators that are not often at the same venue.