Special symposium - Transport 2002 - Specificity and commonality: A tribute to Professor Jose A. Zadunaisky - Introduction

摘要

This special issue of The Journal of Experimental Zoology is intended as a Festschrift, dedicated to Jose A. Zadunaisky, MD, on his seventieth birthday. It is the outcome of a Satellite Symposium of the XIV International Congress of Pure and Applied Biophysics, entitled "Transport 2002," which was held in May, 2002, at the NIEHS Marine and Freshwater Biomedical Sciences Center of the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. The program of the meeting consisted of two days of scientific presentations and social events, all to celebrate the scientific eminence and leadership of Jose A. Zadunaisky. Our colleague, Mortimer Civan, has, in the Foreword to follow, outlined Jose Zadunaisky's scientific achievements. All we wish to add is our personal pleasure to have been able to participate in that celebration and to express our and our colleagues' thanks to Dean Otis Brown and to Dr. Patrick Walsh and Gayle Van De Bogart for organizing an intellectually stimulating and socially enjoyable meeting. The program of Transport 2002 is listed in this issue's Appendix . The scientific papers of this Festschrift readily fall into two groups, those that specifically deal with the eye and those that discuss epithelial ion transport in a variety of other tissues, both areas in which Dr. Zadunaisky has worked throughout his career. Chloride transport, a topic in which Dr. Zadunaisky was a pioneer, is discussed by several papers in the two sections. Civan discusses chloride transport from a historical and contemporary viewpoint; Perry and colleagues, as well as Schettino and Lionetto, deal with chloride absorption and transport in fish; and Dawson and colleagues analyze the manner in which the Cystic Fibrosis Transport Regulator (CFTR) functions as a chloride and anion channel. Jose Zadunaisky spent many summers at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory near Bar Harbor, Maine, where he was able to pursue his interest in marine and fish physiology. His contribution to this field was of importance for understanding that chloride secretion in the gills of sea water fish controls their plasma osmolarity by a mechanism involving cell volume regulation. It is not surprising, therefore, that some papers here deal with ion transport in fish, as in the reports by Perry and colleagues, by Fieber, and by Schettino and Lionetto. The papers by Miller, by Fieber, and by Karnaky and Hazen-Martin raise interesting questions concerning possible relationships to diseases, topics related to Jose Zadunaisky's early interest in physiopathology. Fluid transport in the eye is analyzed in two papers, by Farahbakhsh who looks at purinergic signaling in the rabbit ciliary body epithelium, and by Fischbarg who describes fluid transport in the corneal endothelium. Fischbarg additionally extends his analysis to epithelial fluid transport in general. Even though emphasis is on anion transport, cation transport is not neglected, as in the paper on intestinal calcium transport and in the Delamere comparison of the Na/K-ATPase function in lens epithelium and fibers. Many papers refer to early studies, yet bring to bear on their questions highly contemporary methods. A striking example is the presentation on the potential functional significance of a lens fiber specific membrane protein. Because these papers are truly diverse, yet share an approach and physiological meaning, we have titled the Festschrift Specificity and Commonality. We thank the authors and the presenters for their contributions and the Journal of Experimental Zoology for giving us the opportunity to assemble these papers and thereby to honor our friend and colleague, Jose A. Zadunaisky.