Grand Opportunities: Strategies for Addressing Grand Challenges in Organismal Animal Biology

Abstract

The Biology Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF) has requested that organismal biologists develop a vision and articulate the grand research challenges that will drive the future of organismal biology and the large-scale community-wide efforts that would be needed to address those challenges. Over the past decade, organismal animal biologists have been slow to develop community-wide initiatives relative to other bioscience communities (e.g., molecular biologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and plant biologists). In response to NSF’s request, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) organized an effort to begin to articulate grand visions of the research questions that will form the foundation of future research in organismal animal biology (hereafter referred to as “organismal biology” for brevity). White papers, now known as contributions in the “Grand Challenges in Organismal Biology” (GCOB) series, have been published in Integrative and Comparative Biology over the past 2 years (Denny and Helmuth 2009; Denver et al. 2009; Satterlie et al. 2009; Schwenk et al. 2009; Mykles et al. 2010; Sih et al. 2010). These papers define a number of large-scale forward-thinking research efforts that cross the broad array of disciplines encapsulated by SICB and move organismal biology in new directions: (1) genotype–phenotype relationships, (2) integrating living and physical systems, (3) utilizing functional diversity, (4) organism-environment linkages, (5) evolutionary stability versus change, (6) how nonmodel organisms work, (7) garnering public support for organismal biology, (8) transforming organismal biology into 21st century science, (9) fostering inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary research to yield emergent principles about organisms, (10) community research efforts in addressing GCOB, and (11) the predictive power of organismal biology in the context of ecological and evolutionary change. At the 2010 SICB annual meeting a workshop was held to initiate a dialogue across organismal biology that focused on how to address the GCOBs articulated by SICB (Tsukimura et al. 2010). A number of presentations were made by Executive Committee members of SICB and other professional societies to stimulate discussion. Major requirements for implementation, including bridging research fields and new interdisciplinary approaches to education, were discussed at length. Recommendations resulting from that workshop included establishment of interdisciplinary integrative research cooperatives as a means of increasing activity between large and small research laboratories and expanding coordinated research efforts beyond NIH-listed model organisms, facilitated by sequencing the genomes of a wider range of organisms. Much discussion centered on overcoming the vast educational challenges to prepare our students to become the scientists able and ready to take on the challenges of interdisciplinary integrative research spanning organismal biology and genomics. Participants recognized that to overcome that challenge, significant shifts in the mechanics of our educational efforts may be required. Scientific communication at all levels from colleagues to the general public needs improvement. Sharing of information and cooperation (not competition) must be encouraged. Training (and retraining) scientists to enable them to access changing technology and approaches should be facilitated. We may need to make difficult decisions about whether “context” or “content” is more important for educational objectives that prepare students for future research environments. Participants agreed that a mechanism for developing an umbrella coalition is needed to maintain discussion throughout the year. Outcomes from the 2010 workshop that stood out as important elements that will allow us to address the grand challenges were increased awareness of the grand challenges and identified foci, integration and education. At the 2011 SICB meeting, a second GCOB workshop was organized with the primary objective of engaging SICB members in productive breakout discussions to focus our effort to develop a plan or plans for implementation of grand challenges, and to move this process forward at a more rapid pace. SICB is not the only society with members that are organismal biologists, but SICB as a whole possesses the breadth of research approaches required to address many of the GCOBs. However, the complexity of GCOB questions requires novel collaborations and attitudes about organismal biology’s contributions to science and society. SICB is well-poised to play a leadership role among organismal biologists in addressing GCOBs because of the broad expertise in our society and commitment reflected by our membership. Organismal biologists, such as those in SICB, have the opportunity to shape their own destiny with respect to NSF’s long-term plans for funding in organismal biology. To develop our future, we must join in a broadly accepted vision of our research arenas at least 5–10 years into the future. We must do more than define GCOB questions: we must organize a vision for how to marshal the expertise, financial support, research facilities, and communication channels needed to address the GCOB questions in ways that will be productive and that will continue to keep our efforts in organismal biology fresh and forward-thinking. At the 2011 GCOB workshop, participants were challenged to become involved in thinking hard about the future of organismal biology and developing a community-based approach to meet the grand challenges. The 2011 SICB GCOB workshop opened with a review of how previous efforts had unfolded. Other scientific communities have moved forward in addressing their own grand-challenge research objectives. In many cases, major research programs have resulted from coordinated efforts that involve building community interest, articulating that interest in a series of workshops and white papers, and consolidation of focus by the community to address specific scientific goals and identify (and obtain) required resources to reach those goals. For example, the systematics community initiated the “A Tree of Life (AToL)” program with the initial goal to identify evolutionary relationships among as many organisms as possible, especially at higher levels of organization, and in doing so address fundamental and important problems in ecology, agriculture, human health and society, and development of bioinformatic resources. The current focus among systematic biologists is a mission to assess and map as much of the Earth’s biodiversity as possible, thereby informing conservation efforts to preserve that biodiversity. The molecular biology community involved in plant sciences worked together beginning in the 1990s to launch an initiative to sequence the genomes of Arabidopsis (the primary model species for plant biology) and all of the major crop plants. While not every plant biologist participated, there was overwhelming support from the community in this initiative. In response, NSF launched a series of requests for proposal initiatives beginning in 1998 and including the Plant Genome Research Program, the National Plant Genome Initiative, Genome-Enabled Plant Research, Transferring Research from Model Systems, Tools and Resources for Plant Genome Research, and for fiscal year 2010, Comparative Plant Genome Sequencing. In 2000, the Arabidopsis research community proposed the “Arabidopsis 2010” project involving the determination of the function of every gene in the Arabidopsis genome by 2010. The plant community is now working on their next large vision, the 2020 project, as articulated in white papers (Raikhel, 2008). More recently, the plant biology community has launched the “iPlant collaborative,” a cybernetwork designed to help plant biologists develop interdisciplinary integrative research to address grand challenges in plant biology (http://www.iplantcollaborative.org). Software engineers at iPlant work to develop cyberinfrastructure including “Discovery Environments” to help biologists work on grand challenges. iPlant cyber-resources are allocated by a community-representative iPlant board of directors. Members of the ecology and environmental biology community have launched a series of initiatives aimed at solving large-scale grand challenges. In the early 1990s, the Sustainable Biosphere Initiative was launched by the Ecological Society of America (ESA) and resulted in a series of workshops and white papers that presented a 10-year outlook for ecological sciences. Centers and institutes including the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBios) have all shaped the way in which ecologists frame and address grand-challenge–scale questions. In recent years, the ecology and evolutionary biology community has published a new set of white papers to define the future of these centers. Presently there is a new competition for the next generation of a national environmental synthesis center that will stimulate research, education, and outreach at the interface of the biological, geological, and social sciences. Organismal biologists are now in the early stages in developing community-wide initiatives such as those undertaken by the systematics community, plant biologists, and ecological and evolutionary biology communities. We have articulated ideas about grand challenges in organismal biology through SICB workshops and synthetic white papers (Denny and Helmuth 2009; Denver et al. 2009; Satterlie et al. 2009; Schwenk et al. 2009; Evans et al. 2010; Mykles et al. 2010; Robinson et al. 2010; Sih et al. 2010). A group of organismal animal biologists with primary affiliation in the American Physiological Society (APS) held a workshop in 2007 to discuss developing a National Center Network for Physiological Research, Integration, Synthesis, and Modeling (PRISM). The stated goals of PRISM (Carey 2007) were broad and forward-looking, but PRISM’s initial efforts were directed toward development of a center for research on the physiology of large mammals so as to preserve and maintain present expertise, not to develop a dynamic future for organismal biology. PRISM’s initial efforts have not gained traction, but discussion of PRISM at the April, 2011, APS may substantially shift the present goals of PRISM. We hope to see increased discussion among organismal biologists allied with SICB and APS so that we can work together on scientist-based, not scientific-society-based approaches to developing the resources necessary to address GCOBs. To encourage discussion of how a research community could meet GCOBs, a strawman framework was presented for how to progress from a GCOB idea to garnering the research support needed to address the GCOB (Fig. 1). In this plan, SICB Executive Officers would initiate the process by formation of a grand challenge steering committee (GCSC), which would work to identify one focal interdisciplinary GCOB question. The process of moving from that question to a forward-reaching 5–10 year research agenda then involves three design/discussion loops. Loop 1 is a process that involves a small group of selected field-leading scientists, loop 2 involves a broader group of scientists and students, and loop 3 involves a smaller group of scientists working to engage the community of organismal biologists at large and the public, including funding agencies, in the GCOB research agenda. In loop 1 (Fig. 1), the GCSC would identify relevant fields (e.g., biology, physics, mathematics) pertinent to the GCOB question and recruit leadership participants from each of those fields. Those participants would work together to refine the GCOB focal question, produce a white paper on novel interdisciplinary approaches to addressing the refined GCOB question, and hold a workshop with additional participants. At the workshop (Fig. 1, loop 2), participants would interact in small subgroups organized to encourage novel interdisciplinary and emergent ideas about how to address the refined GCOB question, identify required resources, and generate a research plan. Subgroups would then be shuffled to generate a new set of interactions among participants, and the process repeated until the GCOB question and approach to addressing the question had been further refined (Fig. 1, loop 3). This workshop would result in a white paper explaining both the process and the outcome. This paper could be used to identify public support for the GCOB question, including networking with representatives from funding agencies and/or foundations. Another white paper would then be issued to communicate how the research community would coordinate their efforts in addressing the GCOB question, and this white paper, along with the others could then be used as motivation for funding agencies to launch initiatives to support the sort of work outlined in these workshops. While abstract, members of the audience did find the plan to resonate with their expectation of a process that will ultimately address GCOB questions. One proposed approach for initiating the development of SICB-based GCOB-implementation plan. As an exemplar of how a community could meet GCOBs, current efforts in ecomechanics, the interface between the fields of ecology and biomechanics, were presented. Researchers in ecology and biomechanics have recently become aware of the potential utility of collaborative interaction, but the scope and direction of these interactions has not been defined. To craft a definition, a workshop (funded by the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of the Coastal Ocean [PISCO]) was held in September 2009 at the Friday Harbor Laboratories. The outcome of this workshop was a “manifesto” detailing the potential highlights and roadblocks to fully developing the field of ecomechanics. Segments of this manifesto have been published as review articles, and there is the possibility that the entire document (and its ongoing revisions) will be made available online. A second workshop (funded by the Society for Experimental Biology) was held in Cambridge, England, in March of 2011. The output of this workshop will be a special dedicated edition of the Journal of Experimental Biology. The next step for ecomechanics will be to gather feedback, from both biomechanics and ecologists, on the vision spelled out in products of these workshops. The manner in which feedback will be obtained has yet to be determined, but could potentially take advantage of the capabilities of web-based “social” networks. We anticipate that feedback will allow fine-tuning of the vision for ecomechanics, from which research agendas and the necessary funding for such a research focus can be established. Groups of workshop participants were then tasked with discussing the following two questions: To facilitate small and productive discussion groups, participants were asked to distribute themselves among round tables. In all, there were five discussion groups with 8–10 people in each group. Student scribes recorded the content of discussion. Discussion was observed by SICB executive committee members as well as the director and program officers from the NSF Division of Integrative Organismal Systems. Following discussion, each discussion group was called on to articulate their main thoughts on the two discussion questions. How should a broad, cohesive and long-term vision for organismal biology research be developed? How can investment in this long-term vision be sustained and stimulated by organismal biologists across all career stages? Ideas that emerged from the discussion of Question 1 involved developing a SICB committee (e.g., akin to the student and postdoctoral affairs committee via the SICB secretariat) that would provide a leadership role in developing GCOB activities. Activities proposed included workshops involving scientists at a range of career stages, broadening interactions with other disciplines in animal biology as well as in fields beyond biology, and defining/refining a common vision of the future of organismal biology. The plant biology community has effectively organized their Arabidopsis 2010 and Arabidopsis 2020 (Raikhel 2008) projects around a 10-year research activity plan, and so integrative biologists may be well served by adopting a similar long-range vision to their activities. Workshops should address broad questions (e.g., how do organisms respond to a changing environment) that have the potential to engage organismal biologists from across SICB directorates (as well as other societies such as APS, Society for Developmental Biology, Animal Behavior Society). The format of workshops should encourage among postdoctoral and students in At these participants should to ideas of or should their ideas be The workshops should be as white papers to communicate broadly to members of the research community, and could as for on the through and In to this cyberinfrastructure could be with to encourage of and and the development of to coordinate with other disciplines was as a for addressing many GCOB research communication will allow of our especially in of of the research challenges and specific questions. Interdisciplinary approaches in approaches and resources needed to address large questions. Sharing and may of ideas by groups Interdisciplinary collaborations in research and for a research is was discussion of SICB to take the focused of model versus nonmodel organisms. The plant biology community was in their goals of research by with the Arabidopsis genome sequencing project as an initial into sequencing a plant for SICB scientists to together in the way that plant biologists have in the development of that will allow us to address GCOBs from the of integrative and so will allow integration among levels of and our for example, of how relationships between and organisms in the context of environmental change. 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