Shop Talk: Annual Drosophila Research Conference, 2010

The 51st Annual Drosophila Research Conference took place in Washington, DC, from April 7–11, 2010. Washington, DC, the U.S. capital, is known for its national buildings and historically significant monuments. The Cherry Blossom festival, which was one of the major tourist attractions of the week, was at its peak – as can be seen on the program cover (Fig. 1). This year, the Genetics Society of America (GSA) received a record-breaking number of registrants to the conference. Despite low attendance at other scientific meetings, according to GSA Meetings Manager, Suzy Brown, this year’s conference had the ‘‘largest number of registrants than any other previous years.’’ There were 170 talks, more than 850 posters and 13 workshops; so there was a range of information that people could pick according to their interests. Two members of the Drosophila community received GSA honors. Sherry Marts, GSA executive director, awarded Utpal Banerjee (University of California, Los Angeles) the Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education and William Gelbart (Harvard University, Cambridge) received the George W. Beadle Award for outstanding contributions to the community of genetics researchers. The winner of the Larry Sandler Memorial Lecture Award was Leonardo Barbosa Koerich, a student of Antonio Carvalho (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). The topic of his dissertation was the low conservation of gene content of the Y chromosome across 12 species of Drosophila. He worked with 11 genes from the Drosophila melanogaster Y chromosome and located them on the other sequenced Drosophila species. His work was a very nice evolutionary genetic analysis revealing that the Y chromosome of Drosophila melanogaster is actually gaining more genes than losing. This goes against the canonical theory that the Y chromosome is a degenerated X-chromosome that will eventually become fully degenerated. Leonardo’s seminar was followed by a panel presentation with a theme discussing the major achievements of renowned Drosophila scientists and their impact on the direction of Drosophila research. The panel was introduced by Hugo J. Bellen (Baylor College of Medicine, Houston) and was started by Thomas Kaufman (Indiana University, Bloomington), who talked about the discovery of the white (w) gene and how it led to future Drosophila genetics. Gerald M. Rubin (Janelia Farm, HHMI, Ashburn) discussed the cloning of w and the sequencing of the genome. Allan Spradling (Carnegie Institution for Science, Baltimore) talked about Pelements and their use in transformation, insertional mutagenesis, and the Genome Disruption Project. Susan Celniker (University of California, Berkley) gave a history of the genome project after the initial sequencing was completed and the development of more genomic tools, including the very high-throughput next generation sequencers. Norbert Perrimon (Harvard Medical School, Boston) discussed how the sequencing of the genome has impacted new tool development for Drosophila melanogaster. Finally, William Gelbart talked about annotation of the Drosophila genome then and now, and delivered a brief history of FlyBase.