I thought I was attending the 67th annual event. Drosophila research conference, but somehow ends up being a rock and roll concert. Flyboard President Eric Lai opened the meeting with an electric guitar. Fortunately, his lyrics confirmed that I was in the right place: “Don’t you know that a bee is… a bee! It’s not a matter of asking or why, just the fact that a bee is… a bee!” Those words got attendees out of their chairs and singing along the Sheraton Riverwalk in downtown Chicago.
Before a spirited social hour wrapped up Wednesday night, the Genetics Society of America kicked off the scientific portion of the meeting with two big stars: keynote speaker Amita Sehgal and 2026 Larry Sandler Award recipient Rebecca Tarnopol.
Tarnopol certainly lived up to the hype, wowing the crowd with his brilliant talk on bees’ resistance to parasitic wasps. When wasps lay their eggs in bee larvae, the bees have less chance of becoming adults. However, Tarnopol found that a close relative of the common fruit fly, Drosophila pineappleThe larval fat body has a particularly high survival rate due to three genes. When a wasp lays its eggs a D ananassae larvae, these three genes are involved in the larval immune response to engulf and neutralize eggs. Interestingly, all three genes originate from a single microbe and were picked up. D. ananassae About 21 million years ago. Ternopol’s passion for bees’ immune response to parasites doesn’t stop there. She starts her own lab at UCSF this coming fall!
Amita Sehgal, a long time giant in the field Drosophila Sleep at the University of Pennsylvania, first demonstrated this Drosophila Bees sleep more when sick. This is due to genes. Nimory Production of high levels of a protein called AMP. This trend has since led to the exploration of broader questions about sleep and circadian clock function—from synaptic plasticity and waste clearance to mitochondrial maintenance.
“We were fed up with mammals that didn’t refer to our fly papers,” Sehgal said. Many in the audience nodded in agreement. His lab has followed up on the findings ever since. Drosophila with equivalent experiments in mice. As a model organism, mice can represent human disease states relatively well because we share 99 percent of our genomes. Interestingly, Sehgal observed in mice what he had previously seen in flies: sleep significantly promotes the transfer of energy-producing nutrients from the brain across the blood-brain barrier on a time scale associated with the circadian clock.
Unfortunately, not all fly labs have the resources or facilities to take on a new model organism in response to reviewer comments. Fortunately, the fly is a very accessible model organism: flies reproduce quickly, are cheap and easy to maintain in the laboratory, do not take up much space, and do not require animal care approval. Many genetic tools are also available. Recently we have a publicly accessible map of every neuron in the fly brain. Researchers can study flies at many levels, from whole-organism behavior, to neuron interactions, to a single piece of DNA. So, researchers of all levels can work on Flies (and attend Druse 2026!) Some of the most impressive oral and poster presentations were from undergraduates, including primarily from undergraduate colleges. Seven undergraduate researchers were featured in the Spotlight on Undergraduate Research workshop on Thursday night. An undergrad in the Findlay lab at the College of the Holy Cross gave a talk about a gene on Friday morning. Saturn which is important for male bee fertility.
Thursday, Friday and Saturday afternoons were well spent in poster sessions. Participants put up colorful posters, discussed larval navigation, spatial patterning of germ cells (located in bee gonads), the best model of a “mating wheel” to observe bee courtship, herbicides, how to clean a bee’s head with forceps, and genes with funny names. The Tin Man And painlessjust to name a few.
Despite the switch to daylight savings, Sunday morning brought attendees back to the conference hall for the last few presentations. In particular, Rockefeller University’s Vanessa Rota grabbed the audience’s attention with her discovery of the complex neural circuit for sexual arousal in male fruit flies. Behaviorally, when males compete for a female, they flutter their wings, which disrupts the interpretation of the courtship song in the female’s brain. Interestingly, bees can only hear the courtship songs of a single species. Here he discusses the common fruit fly. Drosophila melanogaster But suggested that brain architecture and even courtship and sexual competition behavior may differ in other species because the circuits must be tuned to specific courtship songs.
It is an open question what goes on in the other’s mind. Drosophila The species left us all on our toes for the Hugo Bellin and Catherine Tasner Drosophila Neurogenetics Lecture. Dr. Mehmet Neşet Özel of the Storrs Institute gave the 2026 lecture on how transcription factors, the on/off switches for genes, define neuron types and guide their wiring in fly brain development.
Participants left the conference energized, exhausted, and excited to apply the lessons of Druse 2026. And the scientists returned to their laboratories to flip their bees with a sense of accomplishment.
