The IXth CSSI international symposium on heat shock proteins in biology and medicine: stress responses in health and disease: Alexandria Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia, November 10-13, 2018

The stress response has been studied now for over 50years and is known to have significance in the survival of organisms in a challenging environment and in the healthy development of all known descendants of the last common universal ancestor (LUCA). This meeting was concentrated mostly on the responses of cells and organisms to environmental and cell stress including the impact of thermal stress, which was a major theme throughout this meeting. One emphasis was on the deployment of the heat shock response that permits damage to proteins to be detected and responded to by the abundant synthesis of heat shock proteins (HSPs). Speakers and presenters of posters responded to the questions of how are the HSPs rapidly induced by stressors? By which mechanisms are they are regulated in the cell by protein-protein interactions or posttranslational modification? And, what are the consequences when these abundantly expressed proteins escape the confines of the cell and influence the extracellular microenvironment? Key among the questions was how does stress influence longevity and aging and what happens in terms of disease control (malignant, neurodegenerative) when stress responses become compromised? In this context, many presenters addressed the question of pharmacologically modifying the heat shock response and HSP functions and thus improving responses to a range of disease types.