Swiss Drosophila Conference

28 June 2023

Simon Sprecher

Prof. Simon Sprecher, UNIFR

Prof. Thomas Flatt, UNIFR

Prof. Anne von Philipsborn, UNIFR

Dr. Boris Egger, UNIFR

Prof. Andrea Brand, NYU, New York, USA

1 junior group leader (UNIFR or CUSO)

11 graduate students / post-doctoral fellows (CUSO or other places from Switzerland)

The annual Swiss Drosophila Meeting is the main forum for the scientific community in Switzerland working with the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as an experimental model system. There are over 30 research groups in Switzerland using this genetic model system for their research, for diverse aspects of biology. It is particularly powerful for large omics-type approaches with whole-genome libraries of gene mutations, RNAi lines and other large-scale resources. The Genetic conservation between the fly and our own genomes make knowledge gained from work on Drosophila highly relevant to our understanding of human development and disease - approximately 75% of human disease genes are conserved and can thus be studied in the fly. In the past decade the arc lémanique has developed into the center of Drosophila research, with the highest density in Lausanne with, but also Geneva and Fribourg have doubled or tripped the number of Drosophila research groups. The annual Swiss Drosophila Meeting is a one-day event and typically attracts about 120-150 participants. Researchers at all levels, ranging from bachelor students to principal investigators, regularly attend this meeting, including numerous newcomers and people returning from their PhD or postdoctoral stays abroad. Attending this major workshop is an extremely important experience for undergraduate and graduate students because this is often the first time that they have a chance to present their original research in front of experts and fellow students at a conference setting. Moreover, the workshop provides the students with an excellent opportunity to meet some of the best researchers in the field (whom they may have known only through their publications), and often permits informal first contacts to be made with group leaders in whose labs they are interested in pursuing doctoral or post-doctoral training. The program includes a plenary lecture, for which we have confirmed as speaker Prof. Andrea Brand from the University of Cambridge (UK) and New York University (USA). Prof Brand is a leading pioneer in the Drosophila research field who holds with the invention of the Gal4-UAS expression system the most cited paper in Drosophila research. Please find additional information about Prof. Andrea Brand on her Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Brand) and the lab website (https://andreabrandlab.org/). We also scheduled one talks from a junior group leader and 11 short (15 minutes) oral presentations from graduate students and post-doctoral fellows (selected from submitted abstracts), and a two-hour poster session.

UNIFR

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