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18. Aug. 2022
For the next two weeks, CEITEC is hosting more than 70 researchers from various laboratories spread across Europe and the world that gathered in Brno to participate in the famous EMBO Practical Course on light sheet microscopy. The primary objective of this course is to enable the 16 students of the course, selected from a large pool of applicants, to learn and implement light sheet microscopy technology pipelines in their home laboratories. EMBO stands for excellence in science and its major goals are to support talented researchers at all stages of their careers, stimulate the exchange of scientific information, and help build a research environment where scientists can achieve their best work.
This EMBO Practical Course on Light Sheet Microscopy was designed by evolutionary biologist from the Max Planck Instiute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden and the CEITEC consortium director, Pavel Tomancak, who is a persistent promoter of imaging technologies. Pavel is joined by Jan Peychl from MPI-CBG and Emmanuel Reynaud from University of Dublin with whom he organized three highly successful EMBO light sheet courses in Dresden. The head of CEITEC Core Facility CELLIM (Cellular Imaging) Milan Esner will provide his valuable expertise related to sample preparation, image acquisition and data analysis, as well as in depth knowledge of the local imaging infrastructure. Many additional light sheet microscopy experts from academia and from industry, local and from around the world, will join the course, deliver lectures and practical workshops and exchange knowledge with the course students. As many as 10 different microscopy set-ups will be brought to Brno by the leading companies developing these high-end instruments. This will make Brno, at least temporarily, the center of the light sheet microscopy Universe. The stars of the light sheet research field will join us and deliver lectures of their current cutting-edge research full of spectacular video imagery. Altogether, this diverse group will for two intense weeks image the biological samples brought in by the course students using the available technologies and analyse the data with the help of high-end big-volume computational analysis. It will be a wild ride.
Light sheet microscopy is an established imaging technology that enables the recording of large biological specimens with minimal photo-damage. It opens new avenues to study cell biological and developmental processes with unprecedented imaging speed and facilitates systems biology approaches by quantitative imaging of living systems in their entirety. Although light sheet technology is still developing, it has become broadly available through commercial and open-access platforms.
Knowledge exchange between scientists from different laboratories can be a pathway to finding a different way to approach a problem and it is also another added value of this EMBO practical course. Experts and researchers from various laboratories across Europe have a chance to get together and focus for two weeks only on the learning and joint development of this technique. Knowledge exchange supports researchers to find a different way to approach an issue and helps to push the boundaries of knowledge even further.
In this interdisciplinary course, CEITEC is building on the tradition of three similar courses that took place in 2014, 2016 and 2018 at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology in Dresden. This new instalment of the course at CEITEC Brno will focus on the emerging trends in the field, namely, the combination of light sheet imaging with other imaging modalities in a correlative approach and probing the physical properties of living systems imaged with the light sheet technology. The correlative approach combines several microscopy techniques and enables researchers to cross the limits of a single method. Given the scientific focus of CEITEC, the course participants will mainly focus on the application of light sheet microscopy to imaging plants and viral infections.
As part of this course, nine open lectures by top light sheet microscopy experts will take place at CEITEC MU in the University Campus Bohunice. Those lectures are open to the wider scientific community and students from Brno.
More information can be found on the course page or on the CEITEC website.