Meeting Abstract
Virtually all organisms face environmental stressors; how they cope with them via eliciting necessary physiological and behavioral changes holds the key to species’ survival and reproduction. Despite the importance of understanding these stress responses, integrative stress responses, particularly the relationships among stress responses at organismal and cellular levels, are not well understood. Here we focus on the link between organismal adrenocortical responses involving glucocorticoids and cellular heat shock responses. They are several parallels between the two; both stress responses change with season and age and play an important role in development and reproduction. More importantly, heat shock proteins are involved in every step of glucocorticoid receptor assembly and function. We discuss supporting and opposing evidence of the link between the two stress responses in in vivo and in vitro studies and propose reactive oxygen species as a potential mediator between adrenocortical and heat shock responses.
