Blogging from the Comparative Physiology Meeting

Greetings from Westminster, CO, site of the 2010 APS Intersociety Meeting: Global Change and Global Science: Comparative Physiology in a Changing World http://the-aps.org/meetings/aps/comparative/index.htm. The meeting is an intersociety meeting, hosted by the American Physiological Society (APS), and co-sponsored by the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) and the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB).

Looked at most of the 221 abstracts for the conference on the plane. Folks from the East coast, West coast, the Southwest, Canada, Norway, France, South Africa and elsewhere will talk about oysters, crabs, rockfish, elephant sea pups, elephants, cockroaches, birds, polar bears, insects and other things. This is my kind of meeting.

Looking forward to the Opening Plenary Session kick-off. George Somero to speak on "Comparative Physiology: A 'Crystal Ball' for Predicting Consequences of Global Change". He believes that the most warm-adapted congeners of a lineage may be most threatened by further global warming, cardiac function is apt to be a 'weak link' in the physiological chain, and adaptive modification of protein stability and function is common in differently adapted congeners, often requiring only one or two amino acid substitutions. Should be interesting.