Meeting Abstract

S2.1  Tuesday, Jan. 4  Introduction: Overview of the Feeding Experiments End-User Database (FEED) WALL, C.E.**; VINYARD, C.J.; WILLIAMS, S.H.; GERMAN, R.Z.; GAPEYEV, V.; LIU, X.; Duke Univ.; NEOUCOM; Ohio Univ.; Johns Hopkins Univ.; NESCent; NESCent cw19@duke.edu

In 2009, we initiated a Working Group of feeding physiologists supported by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center to develop the bioinformatics infrastructure for comparative physiology research on mammalian feeding. We designed the Feeding Experiments End-User Database (FEED), the first multi-species database of organism-level physiological data. FEED includes EMG, bone strain, bite force, sonomicrometry and kinematic data collected during feeding behaviors. Numeric data streams are uploaded in text format accompanied by detailed metadata arranged into nested containers corresponding to the studies, experiments, recording sessions and trials in which data were collected. The papers in this symposium use data that will be publically available in FEED and that address the evolution of the mammalian feeding apparatus, the conservation of motor patterns, and the relationship between motor pattern and ontogeny. They exemplify an important goal of FEED to enable synthetic, mammal-wide analyses of character evolution for feeding physiology traits. FEED will allow scientists to target a number of important questions. These include: 1) what are the primitive states for feeding physiology in major groups, including the primitive mammalian feeding pattern, 2) which nodes contain major changes in feeding physiology, 3) what is the extent of convergence and parallelism in feeding physiology, 4) do rates of evolution in physiological variables match those seen in anatomical structures, and 5) what are the scaling patterns among physiological and anatomical variables. In this talk, we discuss the logic and design of FEED and demonstrate its capabilities using a preview version that will be released for SICB 2011. Supported by NSF.