Associate Professors of the department, Oleh Lushchak and Dmytro Gospodaryov, and 2nd year graduate student Vladyslav Berezovskyi presented the results of their research at the IX International Conference “Drosophila in Experimental Genetics and Biology”. The conference was held on June 16-18 at the base of practices “Hart” of the Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University near Lake Svityaz.
The conference “Drosophila in Experimental Genetics and Biology” was held every two years. Its founder is Doctor of Biological Sciences, Associate Professor Iryna Kozeretska from the National Antarctic Scientific Center of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. Our department was the conference host in 2023. This year, the conference was organized by the academics of the Department of Botany and Methods of Natural Sciences Teaching, as well as the Department of Zoology of the Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University. The participants of this year’s conference were researchers from Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv and Lviv. Invited foreign speakers were Howard Jacobs (Finland), Marija Savić Veselinović (Serbia), Paola Bellosta (Italy and the USA), Michael Rera (France), Svitlana Serga (France), Khalid Khfif (Morocco), Oleksandr Maistrenko (Netherlands), and Halyna Shcherbata (Germany). Plenary speakers from Ukraine were Oleh Lushchak, Natalia Volkova, Natalia Matiytsiv, Oleksandra Protsenko, and Iryna Kozeretska. The topics of the conference comprised the use of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in biomedical research, in particular, in biogerontology, studies of metabolic and hereditary disorders, genotoxicology and neurobiology, the distribution and evolution of various species of the fruit flies, including invasive species, social projects related to the ecology of various Drosophila species, etc.
Oleh Lushchak and Vladyslav Berezovskyi presented the results of extensive work devoted to the change in the shape and size of fruit fly organs with age. Dmytro Gospodaryov spoke about the impact of mutations in the cnc and dKeap1 genes of Drosophila melanogaster.
The employees of the department thank the biologists of the Volyn National University for the warm welcome and high level of organization of the conference.