Concept

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. The Swiss Drosophila research community has a long history going back to one of the founding fathers of modern developmental genetics, Ernst Hadorn who was an influential biologist at the University of Zürich. Currently, there are over 30 research groups in Switzerland using this genetic model system for their research, for diverse aspects of biology, including genetics, molecular, cellular and developmental biology, evolutionary genetics, immunology, neuroscience and most recently genomics. Work with this model system has been rewarded by a total of six Nobel prizes.

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.

The annual Swiss Drosophila Meeting is a one-day event and typically attracts about 150 participants from across the country, including the Universities of Geneva, Lausanne, Fribourg, Bern, Basel and Zürich, as well as the ETH Zürich, ETHZ in Basel, the EPFL and the FMI. Researchers at all levels, ranging from bachelor students to principal investigators, regularly attend the meeting, including numerous newcomers and people returning from their PhD or postdoctoral stays abroad.

The Organising Committee

Anne von Philipsborn, Thomas Flatt, Boris Egger, Simon Sprecher