On 15^th June 2018 our Department hosted the annual Swiss Drosophila Meeting. The meeting was locally organized by Thomas Flatt, Simon Sprecher and Boris Egger. The conference brought together 93 participants from 13 research institutions, featuring 12 contributed talks and 32 poster presentations.

The meeting began with a fascinating plenary talk by Professor Maria Leptin (EMBL Heidelberg), the current director of EMBO, who spoke about “Morphogenesis: from whole organism integration to biophysical principles”.

Talks inside Swiss Drosophila Network
The meeting continued with a set of excellent contributed talks from different Swiss labs on subject spanning neurobiology, developmental genetics, signaling, gene regulation, immunity, and evolution, thus highlighting the diversity and strength of Drosophila research in Switzerland. There were also talks by three new principal investigators, all from Lausanne, who shared their research topics with the Swiss community.

Prizes
At the end of the meeting, the participants voted for the best presentation: the best talk prize was awarded to Thomas Auer (Benton Lab, UNIL) who spoke about “Evolution of olfactory circuits in Drosophilids”, and the best poster prize was awarded to G. Larisa Neagu-Maier (Sprecher Lab, UniFr) for her presentation “A taste of Drosophila  larval taste sensing”. The meeting was a great success; the talks were very stimulating, and the discussions very lively. The conference concluded with closing remarks, an announcement by Bruno Lemaitre about the European Drosophila Research Conference 2019 in Lausanne, and a conference dinner.

The event was generously sponsored by the the University of Fribourg, the Swiss Industry Science Fund (SISF), the Swiss Commission for Molecular Biology (SKMB), as well as by Promega, Milian, and Semadeni, so that the meeting could be kept free of charge.

The next Swiss Drosophila Meeting will take place in summer 2019 at EPFL.

More information: Flatt group - Sprecher group - Egger group, Department of Biology, University of Fribourg