Inspired by the success two years ago, Pavel Tomancak, Jan Peychl, Emmanuel Reynaud and Jan Huisken organised an EMBO practical course on light sheet microscopy for the second time. From August 15th-26th, 2016, 16 students from all over the world, 13 experienced instructors, and 13 high-profile speakers came together for two intense weeks of hands-on light sheet microscopy. It has been an exhilarating time when everyone involved worked hard and played hard.
The course was highly interdisciplinary, true to the nature of this technology. It covered diverse areas including sample preparation, microscope assembly, physics of the light sheet, long term live imaging, image processing, high performance computing and IT challenges of big image data. Commercial as well as homemade set-ups were made available for the students to get familiar with the various flavors of light sheet technology.
The students came from 16 countries all over the world and brought with them diverse samples ranging from traditional model species such as zebrafish, Drosophila and mouse embryos to lizard brain slices, organoids and live kidneys. All these samples were imaged during the course resulting in whopping 59 Terabytes of raw image data. Large part of the course has been dedicated to processing this data and although not complete, it has been largely successful as documented in the final presentations of the student teams. These presentations as well as selected technical and scientific talks were recorded and are available freely on the course web site (http://events.embo.org/16-lsm/ under Programme).
The outcomes of the course were presented at the Light Sheet Conference in Sheffield (www.lsfm2016.org) where two of the students and many speakers attended. In the future we want to further exploit the synergy between the course and the conference by organising both events jointly in Dresden in 2018. Bis dann!