Prigent Garcia Serena, Los Angeles, 20-24 June 2019
22nd International C. elegans Conference
→ 500 € Prize
2nd year PhD student with François Robin, IBPS, Paris
I have participated in the 22nd International C. elegans Conference, form June 20th to 24th. It took place in Los Angeles and I presented a poster. This congress was organized in 3 different types of sessions: plenary sessions, parallel sessions, and workshops.
The workshop “Microfluidics and Customized Experimental Platforms” and the parallel session “Neurobiology: Sensory Responses and Novel Methods” were the most interesting to me. During the workshop, I had the chance to listen to Anthony Fouad, from the Fand-Yen lab, talking about a new robotic system, which allows picking up worms thanks to a robot, with the criteria defined by the user. I think it is a great advance in how fast the job can be done if we can do this overnight and how we can make better use of the human resources of the lab if the simple but long tasks can be done by a robot. Moreover, this can help increase the number of worms isolate on plates, as the robot can work for hours without interruption.
During the parallel session, I was particularly interested by the talk of Sebastian Greiss, where he presented his research on expanding the genetic code, using unnatural amino acids to make photo-inducible proteins. Furthermore, he talked about the different application of his work on making photocageable proteins as well as making protein tagged just by these amino acid as you can make them bind any marker (he compared it to a “Velcro” system). This talk was particularly interesting for my research as we are always looking for new ways to tag proteins, which can be difficult or impossible to tag with regular marker in a functional way. I am looking forward to see more of this tool in the future.
Finally, during the poster session, I had the chance to meet very interesting people and have great feedback. Fumio Motegi and Dan Dickinson, two important group leaders in the field, came to discuss to my poster and I think it was a great opportunity for me to talk with top class researchers about my project.
This congress met my expectations and I am grateful for having attended it.