This volume is the selected, edited proceedings of the International Taurine Sympo- th sium held in Tucson, Arizona, in July 1997. The meeting was a satellite symposium ofthe 16 Biennial Meeting of the International Society for Neurochemistry, which was held in Boston immediately following the Tucson meeting. In view of the desert location of Tucson, the meeting was advertised tongue-in-cheek as being the hottest scientific meeting ever. As the weather lived up to its billing, the Symposium may well have earned the title. The meeting was held in an atmospheric cluster of adobe buildings, old...

This volume comprises the edited proceedings of the International Taurine Sympo- sium held in Osaka, Japan, in June 1995, as a Satellite Symposium of the 15th Biennial of the International Society for Neurochemistry. This Taurine Symposium was the Meeting latest in a series held since 1975 at approximately two-year intervals by an informal group of international researchers. It attracted contributions from 20 countries, ranging from Armenia via Finland and Spain to the United States. Some 121 participants attended. The Symposium was organized and chaired by Junichi Azuma, University of Osaka....

Taurine, or 2-aminoethane sulfonic acid, has long been known to be the major organic product formed from the breakdown of the sulfur-containing amino acids, methionine and cysteine. It is excreted as such in the urine or as bile acid conjugates in the bile. Research over the last 25 years, however, has uncovered an amazing variety of phenomena involving taurine. Despite the fact that the mechanism of action of taurine in some of these phenomena remains to be elucidated, it is clear that taurine is of far more physiological relevance than being the mere metabolic debris of sulfur amino acid...