55th Annual Drosophila Research Conference (#Dros2014)

Eric previously wrote a piece for conference cast about last year's drosophila conference #dros2013, so I was pleased to hear that he'd been back this year too. I asked him to consider how he felt things were different this year, besides the geographic shift from Washington to San Diego, and explore how he has evolved as a scientist over the past year. You can find full details of his experiences over on the Bio2.0 blog.

Name: Eric Sawyer

Date: 26th to 30th March 2014

Location: San Diego, CA, USA

Website: http://www.genetics-gsa.org/drosophila/2014/

I attended my second Drosophila Research Conference, the 55th annual "Fly Meeting," in sunny San Diego, California and presented a poster describing my work on mitochondria in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Though we often think of mitochondria as tiny, bean-shaped power plants, they actually have variable and dynamic shapes that respond to the needs of each particular cell type. My work focuses on sperm development, which in the fruit fly involves the fusion of many small mitochondria into two giant mitochondria that stretch the whole length of the huge 1.8-mm sperm cell. It is not unusual to have a whole conference dedicated to a single organism, especially one as popular as the fruit fly, with its long scientific history and the many genetic tools and variants available to researchers.

Having participated in the meeting in Washington DC last year, I had an idea of what to expect out of the conference. And with another year of fly work under my belt, I was much more conversant in Drosophila lingo. The conference schedule was crammed full, as this scale of conference always is, with around 900 talks and posters and a dozen workshops. Luckily the coffee was apparently limitless.

For me, the major highlight of the conference was the workshop focusing specifically on male fertility in the fly. It was fun to see my area of focus showcased to a broader audience. The head of my lab gave the first talk in the workshop, called "Genetic control of mitochondrial morphogenesis during Drosophila spermatogenesis." Her presentation consisted almost entirely of data from my own experiments, conducted over the last two years. It was exciting to see my work shared with researchers who have common interests. The presentation also drew more people to my poster. As always happens, discussions led to new ideas for future experiments as well as interpretation of my existing results.

I am close to graduating and do not know if I will be still be working with flies in the future. Either way, I have immensely enjoyed being a part of the friendly community of fly researchers.

For details on each day, check out my Bio2.0 post.

(Logo sourced from conference website, all other images provided by the author and not to be reproduced without permisson)

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