[Student Organized Seminar] The Drosophila antimicrobial response at the time of the Cas9/CRISPR gene targeting revolution Center for Developmental Biology

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Category	Other
Date and Time	2014-09-24 16:30 - 17:30
Venue	Auditorium C1F
Speaker	Bruno Lemaitre
Affiliation	The Global Health Institute, School of Life Sciences, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
Title	[Student Organized Seminar] The Drosophila antimicrobial response at the time of the Cas9/CRISPR gene targeting revolution
Poster	click here to download(PDF)
Host	Yuka Hayashi
Summary	Animals possess efficient mechanisms for detecting and neutralizing infection. The application of Drosophila genetics to these mechanisms has generated insights into insect immunity and uncovered general principles of animal host defense. These studies have shown that Drosophila has multiple defense “modules” that can be deployed in a coordinated response against distinct pathogens. These include barrier epithelia, production of reactive oxygen species, antimicrobial factors, blood clotting, the melanization reaction and complex cellular responses. Today, Drosophila can be considered as having one of the best-characterized host defense systems among the metazoan. Until recently, a detailed understanding of the fly immune response was hampered by the difficulty of generating loss-of-function mutations as well as the technological limits of the RNAi approach. The Cas9/CRISPR revolution offers new opportunities to revisit in a systematic manner Drosophila immunity. At the interface between large-scale genomic studies that lack resolution and individual gene analysis that lack breadth, our laboratory has undertaken a meso-scale ‘skilled’ analysis of immune modules, notably by addressing the individual and overlapping function of large immune gene family. In this talk, I will summarize our current knowledge of the field and provide new insights recently gained in the laboratory.