Society For Integrative And Comparative Biology Research Articles

Balancing Act: an Interdisciplinary Exploration of Trade-offs in Reproducing Females.

Trade-offs resulting from the high demand of offspring production are a central focus of many subdisciplines within the field of biology. Yet, despite the historical and current interest on this topic, large gaps in our understanding of whole-organism trade-offs that occur in reproducing individuals remain, particularly as it relates to the nuances associated with female reproduction. This volume of Integrative and Comparative Biology (ICB) contains a series of papers that focus on reviewing trade-offs from the female-centered perspective of biology (i.e., a perspective that places female reproductive biology at the center of the topic being investigated or discussed). These papers represent some of the work showcased during our symposium held at the 2024 meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) in Seattle, Washington. In this roundtable discussion, we use a question-and-answer format to capture the diverse perspectives and voices involved in our symposium. We hope that the dialogue featured in this discussion will be used to motivate researchers interested in understanding trade-offs in reproducing females and provide guidance on future research endeavors.

Let's talk about sex: instructor views and hesitancies related to sex and gender in the biology classroom.

There is much current debate in the US regarding how sex and gender are approached in science and medical classrooms. There does not seem to be sufficient consensus around why it must be taught and how it should be implemented. State-enacted restrictions to both education and healthcare in recent years demonstrate the relevance and importance of sex and gender in the college classroom, not only including but especially in the biology classroom. Given the areas comprising the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), these topics of sex and gender in biology instruction are incredibly salient to our members. Thus, this survey aimed to determine instructors' views of and experiences with sex-diverse gender-inclusive biology. College-level biology instructors who are members of SICB were surveyed about their views of science, views of sex and gender, teaching philosophy, and their experiences with inclusive teaching and with sex-diverse gender-inclusive teaching. The resulting data lead us to implore academic biology to provide more sex-diverse and gender-inclusive teaching tools and resources to educators, while minimizing potential fear of retaliation and backlash to instructors who utilize these teaching methods.

Common Interests Without Common Expertise: Reflections on Early-career Experiences in Cross-Disciplinary Research.

Cross-disciplinary research enables us to tackle complex problems that require expertise from different fields. Such collaborations involve researchers who have different perspectives, communication styles, and knowledge bases, and can produce results far greater than the sum of their parts. However, in an era of increasing scientific specialization, there exist many barriers for students and early-career researchers (ECRs) interested in training and undertaking interdisciplinary research endeavors. This perspective examines the challenges that students and ECRs perceive and experience in cross-disciplinary work and proposes pathways to create more inclusive and welcoming research environments. This work emerges from a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded workshop held during the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) Annual Meeting in January 2023 in Austin, TX. The workshop brought together seasoned interdisciplinary scientists with undergraduate and graduate students to identify and discuss perceived challenges through small group discussions and experience sharing. Through summarizing a range of student concerns about embarking on careers as interdisciplinary scientists and identifying ways to dismantle institutional and lab management-level barriers, we aim to promote an inclusive and collaborative problem-solving environment for scientists of all experience levels.

An Introduction to an Evolutionary Tail: EvoDevo, Structure, and Function of Post-Anal Appendages.

Although tails are common and versatile appendages that contribute to evolutionary success of animals in a broad range of ways, a scientific synthesis on the topic is yet to be initiated. For our Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) symposium, we brought together researchers from different areas of expertise (e.g., roboticists, biomechanists, functional morphologists, and evolutionary and developmental biologists), to highlight their research but also to emphasise the interdisciplinary nature of this topic. The four main themes that emerged based on the research presented in this symposium are: (1) How do we define a tail?, (2) Development and regeneration inform evolutionary origins of tails, (3) Identifying key characteristics highlights functional morphology of tails, and (4) Tail multi-functionality leads to the development of bioinspired technology. We discuss the research provided within this symposium, in light of these four themes. We showcase the broad diversity of current tail research and lay an important foundational framework for future interdisciplinary research on tails with this timely symposium.

Celebrating a New Division of Botany at SICB: An Introduction to the Integrative Plant Biology Symposium

The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) should, in theory, be a home for scientists working across the entire Tree of Life. In practice, SICB has remained principally a society that supports integrative zoological research. Here we highlight a broad collection of what we consider to the best in integrative and comparative plant biology, gathered together for a special symposium at the 2019 SICB meeting. This symposium and special issue mark the initiation of a new Division of Botany within SICB, which we hope will usher in a new era of SICB where botanists and zoologists engage, collaborate, and celebrate together in this especially creative period of integrative and comparative biology.

A call for more physiology at conservation conferences

Scientific conferences are more impactful when they foster novel ideas, create new networks, and promote inter-disciplinary collaboration. The field of conservation physiology is inherently cross-disciplinary, representing the application of physiological techniques and knowledge to address conservation issues. Ideally, knowledge transfer comes from both directions: conservation biologists seek input on physiological techniques that can contribute to the success of their programs, and physiologists collaborate with conservation biologists to plan relevant applications for their work. To assess whether the level of integration between conservation and physiology has been increasing since the formal naming of the discipline of conservation physiology in 2006, we reviewed abstracts from conferences of three societies: Society for Conservation Biology (SCB), Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), and Society for Experimental Biology (SEB). Specifically, we searched for physiology-related keywords in abstracts from SCB meetings, and for conservation-related keywords in abstracts from SICB and SEB. Our results indicate that the percentage of presentations incorporating physiology at conservation meetings has remained relatively steady (2–3%). In contrast, the percentage of presentations citing conservation applications has been rising at both of the integrative biology societies’ meetings and has reached 4.4 and 7.9% at SICB and SEB, respectively. We provide suggestions for why there may be discrepancies between conference types and ways to encourage the presence of physiological topics at future conservation meetings.

Implementing the Organismal Agenda

an agenda,” then you’ve grasped the problem. Those of us who study biology at the organismal level usually identify ourselves as something else—herpetologist, evolutionist, or ecologist, for example. Our professional societies are similarly arranged. It is therefore unsurprising that organismal biology perennially has been given short shrift in research support, not to mention faculty appointments and professional prestige. As a group, we’ve fallen far since the days of scientists such as Richard Owen (the celebrity comparative anatomist who founded the British Museum of Natural History). Despite occasional chest pounding, organismal biologists have failed to act en masse, while other fields have loudly proclaimed their primacy in the biologi-cal hierarchy. This failure is all the more tragic because organismal information is increasingly recognized as both the crux of critical biological questions and the bottleneck in our attempts to answer them (e.g., NRC 2009).In 2009, the National Science Foun-dation (NSF) asked the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) to identify the “grand challenges in organismal biology” (GCOB). There was a sense of urgency under the new presidential administration, and the NSF was setting its own funding priorities. After broad discussion, SICB’s executive committee conceived a set of critical research areas (see Schwenk et al. 2009 for details):• Understanding the organism’s role in organism-environment linkages• Utilizing the functional diversity of organisms• Integrating living and physical systems analysis• Understanding how genomes produce organisms• Understanding how organisms walk the tightrope between stability and changeHere I propose a personal view of four elements necessary in any plan to implement the organismal agenda as set forth in the grand challenges.

SICB boycott New Orleans in stand on science education

Every year at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting–held in a different city annually–the Executive Committee decide the location of the meeting 2 years hence. On most occasions this is an uncontroversial decision, but when SICB President Richard Satterlie and the

Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB)

Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB)

Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB)

Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB)

What is metamorphosis?

Metamorphosis (Gr. meta- "change" + morphe "form") as a biological process is generally attributed to a subset of animals: most famously insects and amphibians, but some fish and many marine invertebrates as well. We held a symposium at the 2006 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) annual meeting in Orlando, FL (USA) to discuss metamorphosis in a comparative context. Specifically, we considered the possibility that the term "metamorphosis" could be rightly applied to non-animals as well, including fungi, flowering plants, and some marine algae. Clearly, the answer depends upon how metamorphosis is defined. As we participants differed (sometimes quite substantially) in how we defined the term, we decided to present each of our conceptions of metamorphosis in 1 place, rather than attempting to agree on a single consensus definition. Herein we have gathered together our various definitions of metamorphosis, and offer an analysis that highlights some of the main similarities and differences among them. We present this article not only as an introduction to this symposium volume, but also as a reference tool that can be used by others interested in metamorphosis. Ultimately, we hope that this article-and the volume as a whole-will represent a springboard for further investigations into the surprisingly deep mechanistic similarities among independently evolved life cycle transitions across kingdoms.

Introduction. The evolution of evo-devo biology.

Once seen as distinct, yet complementary disciplines, developmental biology and evolutionary studies have recently merged into an exciting and fruitful relationship. The official union occurred in 1999 when evolutionary developmental biology, or “evo-devo,” was granted its own division in the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB). It was natural for evolutionary biologists and developmental biologists to find common ground. Evolutionary biologists seek to understand how organisms evolve and change their shape and form. The roots of these changes are found in the developmental mechanisms that control body shape and form. Developmental biologists try to understand how alterations in gene expression and function lead to changes in body shape and pattern. So although SICB only recently validated evo-devo as an independent research area, evo-devo really started over a decade ago when biologists began using an individual organism's developmental gene expression patterns to explain how groups of organisms evolved. To highlight this emerging field, the PNAS Editorial Board has sponsored a special feature on Evolutionary Developmental Biology. This evo-devo special feature contains eight Perspective articles and a review that examine evo-devo's progress to date, as well as 15 research articles that add new information and focus on the most recent evo-devo biology trends. The majority of the research articles were submitted directly to the PNAS office through our Track II system, and were evaluated by an Editorial Board member. After the initial screening, papers were assigned to an Academy Member-editor who oversaw a process where research manuscripts were rigorously peer-reviewed by experts in the field. The basis for all evo-devo research covered in this issue is, arguably, the Cambrian “explosion.” This explosion occurred approximately 550 million years ago and lasted only 45 million years. This “brief” period in history resulted …

An Integrative Science Finds a Home

SOCIETY FOR INTEGRATIVE AND COMPARATIVE BIOLOGY MEETINGATLANTA-- This year's annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), held here earlier this month, marked a milestone for the fledgling discipline known as evo-devo biology. Beginning about a decade ago, modern biologists realized that they might glean clues to how organisms evolved by studying the genes that control development ( Science , 4 July 1997, p. [34][1]). Now, the discipline is so strong that last year it gained its own division within SICB and was invited to present its inaugural symposia in Atlanta. Prominently featured were new findings on the genes needed for butterfly wing development and on the homeobox genes, a key group of developmental genes involved in organizing animal body plans. [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/277/5322/34