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Report on the Melbourne Dictyostelium Conference 2005
La Trobe University
Institute for Advanced Study, 21st July 2005
By Paul R. Fisher
This, the second Melbourne Dictyostelium conference, was held in the solacious surroundings of
the Institute of Advanced Study and involved 25 delegates from the three university
research groups in Melbourne who work with this "lab classic" (as it was
recently headlined in Nature). In addition to the official conference
delegates, a number of the sessions attracted visitors, including a
Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the IAS, an historian from the La Trobe
University History Department, and several postgraduate research
students from "non-Dicty" research laboratories at La Trobe University.
The conference provided an opportunity for the Dictyostelium researchers
in Australia (all of them in Melbourne) to report the progress of their
research, to exchange experiences and ideas, and through discussion with
others of like mind to develop new or extend existing collaborations.
All but one of the 16 speakers were postgraduate students at various
stages of their PhD research projects. The exception was an Honours
student from Deakin University who also presented the only non-Dicty
talk of the day, a fascinating exposition on organelle (mitochondria and
chloroplast) division in diatoms, a subject which overlaps with the
interests of a number of the other delegates in the division of
mitochondria in Dictyostelium.
The talks, all of very high quality, were arranged by the organizer Sarah Annesley (herself a
PhD student) around major themes of the research in the three laboratories and were amazingly
diverse given the relatively small population of researchers. We enjoyed presentations delving
into the complexities of mitochondrial and lysosomal storage diseases using Dictyostelium
as a model, talks on mitochondrial (and chloroplast) division, on signal transduction pathways
involved in responses to light and chemical attractants, on mitochondrial protein import and on
enzymes involved in mitochondrial gene expression and replication. Yet in the diversity there
were common threads and interconnections because the biology of these various processes is all
interwoven in the organism into a complex tapestry whose patterns are emerging from the work
done by these young researchers.
In the impoverished research climate of Australia, young postgraduate researchers are affected
more than their senior colleagues by the tyranny of distance, of Australia's physical isolation
from the rest of the world. Their opportunities to meet and 'talk science' with colleagues in
their immediate field of interest is limited by the small scientific community here and by the
expense of attending international conferences. We were fortunate indeed that this most
successful meeting was sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Study so that the postgraduate
students could present their work formally to colleagues in their field in the context of a
scientific conference. The IAS provided not only the venue, but also morning and afternoon tea
as well as a scrumptious lunch, with facilities and catering arrangements analogous to what the
students would find at an international conference held elsewhere in the world. It is
appropriate that the IAS sponsored the meeting as part of its "Showcasing the Future" programme,
because the young, talented researchers who presented their work are part of the next generation
of senior scientists in this country. I salute them, the future they represent and the IAS for
its vision in supporting them.
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