Flying High - 54th Annual Drosophila Research Conference (#dros2013)

Eric Sawyer from over on the Bio 2.0 blog was kind enough to write this fantastic overview of the recent Annual Drosophila Research Conference (#dros2013) organised by the GSA in Washington DC. This is probably the largest regularly occuring conference dedicated to fruit fly research in the world. Attending a conference of this scale can be a really daunting task and it requires a lot of planning to make the most out of such a packed schedule. Eric put together this short taster of the conference but a more detailed post about each day can also be found on Bio 2.0 (links at the end of this post).

Name: Eric Sawyer

Date: 3rd to 7th April 2013

Location: Washington DC, USA

Website: http://www.dros-conf.org/2013/

From April 3 to 7 I attended the 54th annual Drosophila Research Conference in Washington DC, my first fly genetics conference. I began working in my college's fruit fly genetics lab last semester as an undergraduate project and have come to enjoy using flies as a powerful tool for answering fundamental questions about developmental genetics and cell biology.

The conference began with a keynote by recent Nobel Laureate Jules Hoffmann about his work on the immune system which, to my surprise, shares a lot of common elements with the system that controls the fly body pattern: Dorsal, Cactus, and Toll. The fly community has a long tradition of naming genes creatively. It was common to hear established academics referring, in all seriousness, to genes like Cappuccino, Shavenbaby (svb), Pavarotti, and Hippo.

Each day of the conference began with early scheduled talks, with poster sessions and workshops later in the day. Since there were over 150 talks and nearly 1000 posters, seeing everything was just not possible, and trying to see too much can be exhausting. Instead I tried to get a broad sample of the work going on in the fly community by visiting as many different sessions as I could while spending a bit of extra time on my own lab's area of spermatogenesis. At this stage in my career I am more interested in learning new science and hearing about potential graduate institutions than, for instance, scoping out potential competitors.

To add some flavor, the organizers were even kind enough to invite a butterfly lab from Cambridge to give a plenary talk about the evolution of wing patterning. Their talk addressed Müllerian mimicry, where, for example, two poisonous species converge on the same warning wing coloration. They have found that these patterns are mediated by very few large-effect areas of the genomes of the South American butterflies they examined. Other high points included using RNA sequencing of slices of the fly embryo to generate a virtual spatial map of gene expression, understanding gastrulation using cell tension and fluid dynamic modeling based on fluorescent beads placed inside the embryo, and combining image processing with neural imaging to understand how fly larvae respond to environmental cues at both the whole organism and single neuron levels.

The three poster sessions were a great chance to meet new people and learn about research through having interactive conversations. Among much else, I learned that Wolbachia bacteria infect flies and hitch a ride on stem cells that give rise to the egg, ensuring their infection of the next generation, and that the transcription factor CrebA controls a broad suite of tools for secreting molecules, including regulating the production of the cargo itself, but that the mutant has some funky characteristics that are hard to explain. Somewhat disappointingly, despite (because of?) my eagerness, I failed to draw the attention of the coveted two Nobel Laureates in attendance or the woman from FlyBase with bright blue hair to my poster. I did however have some great discussions, and I am full of ideas for experiments to include in my undergraduate thesis-more than I could ever hope to complete before I graduate next year.

I came away with a greater appreciation of the broad scope and warm demeanor of the fly research community. My advisor told me that before airport security became so strict, people would bring fly vials to trade around and smuggle back home in their coat pockets. Nowadays, with X-ray scanners mandatory, these conference trading activities would probably make for a much more colorful methods section.

I plan to ride this wave of energy for fly research all the way to next year's conference in San Diego. Maybe I will see you there.

To hear more from Eric at #Dros2013 follow the links to Bio 2.0:

Day 1 - Innate immunity, a Nobel cause

Day 2 - Location, location, location: Patterns, Niches and infecting a new generation

Day 3 - Genes & Environment, shaping the future

Day 4 - All for One: Friends and Multifunctionality