Centre for Organismal Studies Symposium: How Organisms Adapt to the Environment
Press Release No. 88/2024
17 July 2024
International conference “Life in Context” to take place at the Centre for Organismal Studies at Heidelberg University
How organisms perceive their environment and adapt to it is the topic of an international symposium hosted by the Centre for Organismal Studies (COS) at Heidelberg University on 22 and 23 July 2024. The focus of the two-day event featuring lectures and poster sessions is the question of which strategies make it possible for organisms to respond to changes, and how these interactions and adaptations affect them. The speakers at the symposium “Life in Context” include experts from Austria, Germany, Japan, Spain, the UK and the USA.
Organisms interact with their environment on different levels – from their molecules and cells to their tissues and behavior. These interactions extend over a wide variety of time frames, which can span milliseconds or even years. As part of the symposium, participants will discuss how interactions and adaptations affect organisms from a genomic, cell-biological, developmental, behavioral and evolutionary perspective.
The symposium “Life in Context – Organismal Sensing and Adaptation in the Natural Environment” will start with, among others, contributions on stress-induced changes in cultivated plants and the physical mechanisms that enable life underwater. The event will continue on the following day with contributions that cover such topics as the survival strategies of roots and the adaptation strategies of the Drosophila fruit fly.
The symposium also includes a keynote lecture by Prof. Dr Liam Dolan, scientist at the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He will use the example of the common liverwort to illustrate how early plants adapted to life on land. The English-language lecture is open to the public and will take place on 23 July in the large lecture hall of the Centre for Organismal Studies, Im Neuenheimer Feld 230/231, starting at 4.15 p.m.
With its series of symposia launched in 2011, the COS aims to showcase cutting-edge research in the field of organismic biology to a broad audience – from academics to laymen.