Meeting Abstract
Most organisms initiate a highly conserved ‘stress response’ in the face of environmental and social stressors. Assumptions are that variation in the way in which individuals respond to stressors has important fitness consequences. However, in the last decade, these assumptions have been questioned. For example, individual variation in baseline and stress-induced levels of glucocorticoids predicts survival or reproductive success only in some cases. One primary reason behind this equivocal relationship between well-conserved organismal stress responses and fitness-related measures is the effects of stress hormones are often context- and condition-dependent. Thus, there is a dire need to understand how stress responses are integrated across levels of biological organization to form ‘the stress phenotype’. Towards this end, the goal of this symposium is to bring together researchers from diverse backgrounds that study the stress response across levels of organization (i.e., molecular, cellular, and organismal biology) to share findings and foster collaborations to better understand the integrated stress response from genomes to phenomes. An enhanced understanding of the integrated stress response has important evolutionary implications and is critical for predicting how organisms will respond to climate change and increasing human perturbation. The symposium will begin with a brief introduction by organizers.
