I enjoyed speaking last night at Ignite Seattle, sharing the story so far of the ups and downs (and ups again) of FlySorter. The amazing team that runs that event (in conjunction with Bootstrapper Studios) has already edited the videos and put them online. My presentation follows:

If you saw the Ignite talk and are interested in learning more about about fruit flies, I’m glad at least a little of my fly fascination rubbed off. Here are a couple of resources I’d recommend to learn more about Drosophila research:

  • The Manchester (England) Fly Facility has a great section targeted towards the public, and they also have some suggestions on how schools can integrate work with Drosophila into curricula (there are some cool science projects to be done, for sure).
  • And while The Fly on the Wall blog at Brandeis is a little heavier on the science, it’s still quite accessible — they do a wonderful job summarizing new papers and discoveries involving flies for us non-biologists.

There’s a good bit of the FlySorter story already posted on this blog, and, as I mentioned in my talk, the next few months promise a lot more. The dispenser product we’ve been working on for the past 6 months entering its beta testing phase, and will be available for sale soon. The automated sorter isn’t too far behind, and we’ve been working on a novel way to store individual flies as well, in case we weren’t busy enough. Stay tuned for more updates!

Ignite Seattle