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Barcelona hosts the most important European conference on `Drosophila’ research

By 15 de October de 2013November 18th, 2020No Comments
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More than 700 international scientists will attend the EDRC.
 15.10.2013

Barcelona hosts the most important European conference on `Drosophila’ research

From 16 to 19 October, more than 700 international scientists will attend the (EDRC 2013), the most important European conference focused on basic and biomedical research that uses the fly fruit, Drosophila melanogaster, as a model system. The organizing committee is composed of scientists from the University of Barcelona, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), based in the PCB.


The biennial conference, which takes place in Barcelona’s Palau de Congressos, includes 7 plenary lectures, 300 talks, 20 sessions and 400 posters. “The European scientific community has been recommending Barcelona as the host site for this conference for some years. The 2011 Nobel Laureate in Medicine, Jules Hoffmann, from the University of Strasbourg, will open the meeting with the plenary lecture “Innate immunity: from fly to humans”.

The article published by Hoffmann in the journal Cell fifteen years ago was one of the catalysts for current biomedical research using Drosophila to study human diseases. It is a growing tendency, which is reflected in the scientific sessions of the conference”, explains Marco Milán, ICREA researcher at IRB Barcelona and co-organizer of the conference, together with Florenci Serras (Dept. Genetics UB), Cayetano González (IRB Barcelona), Jordi Casanova (IRB Barcelona-CSIC) and Enrique Martín Blanco (CSIC).

The fly has been used to study basic biology for over one hundred years “and it is still an exceptionally good organism for this kind of research”, adds Milán. “Since Hoffmann’s discoveries, the fly has also proved to be effective for modeling diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, or drug addiction”.

The sequencing of fly and human genomes has revealed that these species share 70% of genes associated to diseases. Research on Drosophila has already received six Nobel Prizes