Meeting: Multifunctional structures and multistructural functions: Functional coupling and integration in the evolution of biomechanical systems, January 3-7, 2019 in Tampa Florida

该奖项将支持参加2019年1月综合与比较生物学学会年会研讨会的参与者。这次研讨会将汇聚研究形态进化及其功能的不同生物学家小组。特别是，演讲者将讨论需要协调许多结构(例如，摄食和运动)的行为以及在多种行为中使用相同结构的生物体的研究。这种多组分协调(称为整合)在生物体中很常见，但由于数据采集和分析工具的限制，通常不涉及。本次研讨会将通过促进站在解决整合假说前沿的发言者之间的讨论，利用进化统计和生物力学分析的新工具，促进对整合如何影响生物体生态和进化的理解。演讲者在研究主题、职业阶段、性别、种族和机构类型方面各不相同。每位演讲者将在《综合与比较生物学》上发表一篇文章，为未来对这些想法感兴趣的研究人员提供资源。本期还将突出学生和早期职业研究人员提交的免费演示文稿。参与者之间的公开对话，包括小组讨论，已被纳入该项目，学生社交媒体代表将向包括公众在内的无法出席研讨会的人传达想法和问题。随着越来越多的基因组工具的使用向科学家提供关于表型的遗传控制的信息，对推动复杂表型进化的模式和过程的理解滞后，例如许多生物力学系统中固有的模式和过程。功能形态学家和生物生物学家努力了解生物体如何在特定的环境中生存和繁衍。然而，生物体的各个部分经常以复杂的方式相互作用，从而影响功能、生存和进化。例如，一些结构元素相对于功能可能是多余的，生物体可能在不同的环境中以不同的方式使用这些元素，或者生物体可能使用相同的解剖元素来执行多种功能。这些相互作用通常被认为是对适应和进化能力的限制，但如果它们允许多个部分以有利于生存的方式同时改变，它们也可能促进进化。形式-功能关系的这些新特性应该引起比较生物学家的相当大的兴趣，但该领域一直受到这些问题的广泛范围的限制，这些问题需要潜在的复杂方法。本次研讨会旨在协调和统一这种综合的组织观点，为新的方法论方法提供灵感，并产生新的假设，以刺激未来对结构和功能复杂性的研究。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award will support participants in a symposium at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in January 2019. This symposium will bring together a diverse group of biologists that study the evolution of morphology and its function. In particular, the speakers will discuss the study of behaviors that require coordination of many structures (e.g., feeding and locomotion) and organisms that use the same structures across multiple behaviors. This multi-component coordination (referred to as integration) is common in organisms but, due to limitations in data acquisition and analytical tools, is typically not addressed. This symposium will foster improved understanding of how integration influences the ecology and evolution of organisms by promoting discussion among speakers who are at the forefront of addressing hypotheses of integration, leveraging new tools in evolutionary statistics and biomechanical analysis. The speakers are diverse in terms of research topic, career stage, gender, ethnicity, and type of institution. Each speaker will publish an article in Integrative and Comparative Biology to provide a resource for future researchers interested in these ideas. This issue will also highlight complimentary presentations submitted by students and early career researchers. Open dialogue among participants, including a panel discussion, has been built into the program, and student social media representatives will convey ideas and questions to those who are unable to attend the symposium, including the public. As increasing use of genomic tools informs scientists about genetic control of phenotype, understanding of patterns and processes driving evolution of complex phenotypes, such as those inherent in many biomechanical systems, lags behind. Functional morphologists and organismal biologists strive to understand how organisms persist and flourish in a given environment. However, the parts of an organism often interact in complex ways to affect function, survival, and evolution. For example, some structural elements can be redundant relative to function, organisms may use such elements differently across contexts, or organisms may use the same anatomical element to perform multiple functions. These interactions are typically considered constraints on the ability to adapt and evolve, but they may also facilitate evolution if they allow multiple parts to change simultaneously in a way that favors survival. These emergent properties of form-function relationships should be of considerable interest to comparative biologists, but the field has been constrained by the broad scope of these questions that require potentially complex methodologies. This symposium aims to reconcile and unify this integrative organismal perspective, provide inspiration for new methodological approaches, and generate new hypotheses that can stimulate future studies of structural and functional complexity.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.