Institute of Healthy Ageing

March 7 - 11 2012

Dr Ekin Bolukbasi (Partridge Lab) attended the 53rd American Drosophila Genetics Conference in Chicago. Ekin writes:

I had the opportunity to attend the 53rd American Drosophila Genetics Conference in Chicago. It was a great meeting featuring plenary talks from famous Drosophilists such as Carl Thummel, Suzanne Eaton and Denise Montell. Furthermore, I was particularly intrigued by the high quality science presented during platform sessions of Drosophila Models of Human Disease as well as Ageing and Physiology, which highlighted once again the power of Drosophila as a model organism to investigate basic biomedical questions affecting human health. This year’s Larry Sandler award went to Stephanie Turner Chen, University of California Riverside for her discovery of Identification of a new class of odorants that are present in the food and are responsible for inhibition of carbon dioxide sensitive neurons in the antennae during. Since related odorants are effective inhibitors of the CO2 response in Culex mosquitoes too, they could potentially be used as very effective mean of disease control transmitted by these mosquitoes.