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There are so many ways to understand human development without examining humans! We can study development and disease using a dish of cells (in vitro), or another organism altogether (in vivo). Join us for a fun interactive session with talks about human eyes you can grow in a dish and what you can learn from a tiny fruit fly!
Mini Human Eyes In A Dish
Van Annika Zean Rick-Lenze
(PhD Student)
Understanding how our eyes develop is important. Animal models like mice and zebrafish have been useful in eye studies, but are often a poor predictor of human disease. Enter the creation of retinal organoids - a piece of tissue made from stem cells - which looks like ‘eye goop’ and takes six months to grow but has all the cells and light-sensing abilities that are in the actual human light-sensing tissue (retina). Be ready to open your eyes and be fascinated with the world of retinal organoids and find out what can happen if something goes south in a gene!
Of Fly and Men
Prof. Andreas Prokop
(Professor of Cellular & Developmental Neurobiology, The University of Manchester)
Did you know that the fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) that hover over bins in the summer are the best understood organisms on the planet? That the knowledge scientists gained from studying those flies was instrumental in understanding human biology? Or that 9 ‘fly scientists’ received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine? This session will explain the history of fly research and how these tiny flies became an important driver of progress in biomedical science. The session will be spiced up with some micro-experiments that bring you in close contact with Drosophila as a model system.
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