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Jerome Korzelius, an F1000 Specialist, guest posts on his experience at EDRC 2013.

To paraphrase EDRC co-organizer Jordi Casanova, it felt almost rebellious, all these scientists coming together to talk about fundamental research on the model organism Drosophila (aka the fruit fly) in times of scant funding and increased pressure on scientists to do more translation-focused research. Fortunately, the drosophilists showed up by the hundreds in the beautiful city of Barcelona and their science made this a meeting to remember.

 

The meeting kicked off on a Wednesday morning with several special interest workshops. I had the honor of being the second presenter at the Gut Workshop, presenting my work on fly gut stem cell differentiation. The talks here focused on the Drosophila midgut as a model for intestinal homeostasis, as well as immune response to various intestinal pathogens. The afternoon continued with the “Cold-Blooded Cancer” workshop, which focused on the use of Drosophila as a model system for tumor cell biology. It emerges that small-molecule screening (Dominguez lab), micro-RNAs (Cohen lab) and oncogene-driven oncogenesis in the adult midgut (Vidal lab) are but a few of the relevant topics in cancer biology that are tackled effectively using the fruit fly.

That evening, keynote-speaker and Nobel-Prize winner Jules Hoffmann (also a Section Head for F1000Prime) was awarded the IUBMB award for his work in the field of innate immunity. Jules remarked that the identification of the Drosophila Toll receptor by Bruno Lemaitre was a major breakthrough in the field of innate immunity, a highly conserved immune response that acts in humans and flies alike as a first line of defense against pathogenic invaders.

The next three days were filled with great science from within and beyond the European borders. Of particular interest were the advances made using live imaging. Some excellent examples were given in the ‘Morphogenesis and Organogenesis’ session. Beautiful movies of embryos during gastrulation (Tanentzapf lab) and hemocytes (immune cells) during the wound response (Galko and Wood labs) demonstrated the use of live imaging in creating new insight into the timing and physics of these fundamental processes. Advanced imaging technologies were presented, such as spinning disc confocal and selective plane illumination microscopy (SPIM) light sheet microscopy, that allows researchers to view in unprecedented detail, both by time scale and the size of objects that can be imaged. The OpenSPIM project presented by Pavel Tomancak allows SPIM technology to be accessible to labs on a small budget and allows labs to build their own version of this light sheet microscope.

The evenings were set aside for poster sessions and socializing. As always, it felt there was too little time for both, which gives credit to the great overall quality of the work at this meeting and the researchers attending. I think the organizers in Barcelona outdid themselves in creating a very diverse and high-quality program for this meeting. Although the humble fruit fly is one of the oldest biological model organisms, it is far from outdated and researchers are still using it to do great science today. The meeting closed with the preliminary announcement of the location for the 2015 EDRC: my current hometown of Heidelberg! It is clear that we Heidelberg drosophilists will have some big shoes to fill if we want to top the 2013 EDRC.