I thought I was attending the 67th Annual Drosophila Research Conference, but somehow ended up at a rock-and-roll concert. Fly Board President Eric Lai opened the meeting with an electric guitar riff. Luckily, his lyrics confirmed I was in the right place: “Don’t you know that the fly… is fly! It’s not an ask or a why, just a fact that the fly… is fly!” These words got attendees out of their chairs and singing along at the Sheraton Riverwalk in downtown Chicago. 

Before a buzzy social hour to wrap 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 her brilliant talk on fly resistance to parasitoid wasps. When wasps lay their eggs in fly larvae, those flies have a low chance of making it to adulthood. However, Tarnopol found that a close relative of the common fruit fly, Drosophila ananassae,has a particularly high survival rate because of three genes in the larval fat body. When a wasp deposits its eggs in a D. ananassae larva, these three genes are involved in the larva’s immune response to encapsulate and neutralize the eggs. Interestingly, the three genes originate from a microbe and were picked up by D. ananassae about 21 million years ago. Tarnopol’s passion for fly immune response to parasitoids doesn’t stop here. She starts her  own lab at UCSF this coming fall! 

Amita Sehgal, a longstanding giant in the field of Drosophila sleep at the University of Pennsylvania, previously demonstrated that Drosophila flies sleep more when sick. This is due to the gene nemuri producing higher levels of a protein called AMP. This phenomenon has since led to the exploration of  broader questions about sleep and the circadian clock’s function—from synaptic plasticity and waste clearance to mitochondrial maintenance. 

“We were fed up with the mammalian people not citing our fly papers,” Sehgal said. Many in the audience nodded in agreement. Her lab has since followed up on results from Drosophila with equivalent experiments in mice. As a model organism, mice can represent human disease states relatively well since we share 99% of our genomes. Interestingly, Sehgal observed in mice what she had previously seen in flies: Sleep crucially promotes passage of nutrients into and waste products of energy production out of the brain through the blood brain barrier on a time scale associated with the circadian clock. 

Unfortunately, not all fly labs have the resources or facilities to pick up a new model organism in response to reviewer comments. Luckily the fly is a very accessible model organism: Flies reproduce quickly, are cheap and easy to maintain in the lab, do not take up a lot of space, and do not require any animal care clearance. There are many genetic tools available too. As of recently we have a publicly accessible map of every neuron in the fly brain. Researchers can study flies on many levels, ranging from the behavior of the whole organism, to the interactions of neurons, down to single strands of DNA. Therefore, researchers of all levels can work on flies (and attend Dros 2026!) Some of the most impressive oral and poster presentations were from undergraduates, including from primarily undergraduate colleges. Thursday night featured seven undergraduate researchers at the Spotlight on Undergraduate Research workshop. On Friday morning an undergrad in the Findlay lab at College of the Holy Cross gave a talk about a gene called saturn that is crucial for male fly fertility. 

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday afternoons were well spent at the poster sessions. Attendees swarmed colorful posters, discussing larvae navigation, spatial patterning of germline cells (located in the fly gonads), the best model of “mating wheel” to observe fly courtship, herbicides, how to cleanly pull off a fly’s head with forceps, and genes with funny names like tinman and painless, just to name a few. 

Despite the switch to daylight savings, Sunday morning brought attendees back to the conference hall for the last few presentations. Notably, Vanessa Ruta of Rockefeller University captured the audience’s attention with her discovery of the complex neural circuit for sexual arousal in male fruit flies. On the behavioral side, when males compete for one female, they make a flicking noise with their wings which interrupts the interpretation of the courtship song in the female’s brain. Interestingly, flies can only hear the courtship songs of the same species. Here she discussed the common fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster but suggested the brain architecture and even courtship and sex competition behavior could be different in other species because the circuits must be tuned to the specific courtship songs. 

This open question of what happens in the brains of other Drosophila species left us all on our toes for The Hugo Bellen and Catherine Tasnier Drosophila Neurogenetics Lecture. Dr. Mehmet Neşet Özel of the Stowers Institute delivered the 2026 lecture on how transcription factors, the on/off switches for genes, specify neuron types and guide their wiring in the development of the fly brain. 

Attendees left the conference enriched, tired, and excited to apply lessons from Dros 2026. Although five days long, the meeting flew by! And scientists returned to their labs to flip their flies with a sense of fulfilment.  

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