Meeting Abstract

S6.12  Monday, Jan. 5  Nutritional PharmEcology RAUBENHEIMER, David; Massey University, Auckland d.raubenheimer@massey.ac.nz

Recent advances in nutritional ecology have demonstrated the importance of understanding the interactive effects that food components have on animal feeding and physiological and life history responses. In this talk I argue that these developments have profound implications for the emerging field of PharmEcology. They demonstrate the importance of: 1) taking a multivariate approach to understanding the responses of animals to toxins and pathogens, and 2) of including macronutrients among the focal variables. I will introduce a framework – the Geometric Framework – that has been developed for modelling the complexity of animal-food interactions, and illustrate its application to questions concerning food-based toxins and disease in insects.