Invertebrate Oxygen Carriers

The international conference on "Invertebrate Oxygen Carriers" took place from July 29th to August 1st, 1985, at Tutzing, in a pleasant setting on Lake Starn- berg. It was the 8th in a series which started in 1966 with a meeting in Naples on the "Physiology and Biochemistry of Haemocyanins" organized by F. Ghiretti. The list of contributors and participants of the Naples meeting reports thirty names among which we find that of A. C. Redfield, a pioneer of this field. In Tutzing over 100 scientists came together to discuss their research on all types of oxygen transporting proteins. Clearly the invertebrate hemoglobins have received increasing attention, and a more unified view of their complex quaternary structure is emerging. Their sequences are becoming unravelled and their functions more rationally understood. Hemerythrins have been covered, and their mechanism of binding oxygen explained lucidly. In the hemocyanin field there were exiting new results at every structural level - the X-ray structure of Panulirus hemocyanin, a wealth of sequence data for both arthropodan and molluscan types of hemocyanin, the molecular dimension of native hemocyanins provided by cryo-electron microscopy. New insights into the evolution of copper proteins have been obtained. There are new approaches to explain allosteric interaction in such complicated systems. The scope of investigations reaches from molecular genetics to organismic physiology. The conference received major support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and from the Bayerisches Staatsministerium fUr Unterricht und Kultus.