Jean-Marc Pequignot – författare

Since the early 1990s, the field of oxygen-sensing has evolved from the findings of further oxygen sensing cells both in peripheral and central tissues, of molecules and channels implicated in chemoreception, and of transcriptional factors controlling the expression of a number of genes involved in physiological responses to hypoxia. In order to take into account these new aspects of chemoreception, this volume presents a multidisciplinary approach at the interface of cellular, molecular biology and integrative physiology with the main objective to elucidate the chemosensory processes and associated cardiorespiratory functions in hypoxic/hypercapnic environmental conditions. Specifically, the volume presents up to date major aspects of the chemoreceptor pathway from molecular and cellular signalling processes in the carotid body and other oxygen-sensing structures to central integration of chemosensory inputs and systemic implications.Because sustained changes in oxygen homeostasis are able to induce morphofunctional remodelling which remains poorly understood but may provide further ways of research in physiology and pathophysiology, two sessions were devoted to the mechanisms involved in the processes of plasticity induced by long-term or intermittent hypoxia during the perinatal period or at adulthood.

Since 1959, the International Society of Arterial Chemoreception (ISAC) has organized in a variety of countries fifteen scientific meetings devoted to the mechanisms of peripheral arterial chemoreception and chemoreceptor reflexes. After the meeting held in Philadelphia with Sukhamay Lahiri as president, ISAC membership elected Lyon (CNRS, University Claude Bernard, France) as the site of the xv" ISAC Symposium. The Symposium was effectively held in Lyon from the 18th to the 22nd of November 2002 and Jean-Marc Pequignot was its president. The organizers were Jean-Marc Pequignot and Yvette Dalmaz Lyon (CNRS, University Claude Bernard, France) and the Scientific Committee was formed by John Carroll (University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, USA), Constancio Gonzalez (University of Valladolid, Spain), Prem Kumar (University of Birmingham, U. K. ), Sukhamay Lahiri (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA), Colin Nurse (McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada), and Nanduri Prabhakar (Case Western University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA). The Symposium in Lyon intended to follow the path opened in Philadelphia gathering people working at the interface of cellular and molecular biology with researchers in the more classical topics of chemoreception pathways and reflexes. The aim was to join experts with different perspectives. Along these lines, some participants are engaged in the exploration of the intimate mechanisms of oxygen sensing and cellular responses, with their work centered in a great number of preparations covering a broad spectrum from bacteria, to chemoreceptor cells or to central nervous systems neurons.