From August 18th-29th, 2014, Dresden has once again become the center of the light sheet microscopy universe. The EMBO practical course organised by Pavel Tomancak, Jan Peychl, Jan Huisken and Emmanuel Reynaud brought together 17 students, 17 instructors and 17 high-profile speakers together for intense two weeks of hands-on light sheet microscopy.
The course was highly interdisciplinary, true to the nature of this emerging 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 flavours of light sheet technology.
The students came from 16 countries all over the world and brought with them diverse samples ranging from cephalopods, bryozoans, beetles, monkey brain slices, spheroids, organ explants to more traditional model species such as Drosophila, zebrafish and mouse and plants. All these samples were imaged during the course and the results were documented on a publicly accessible wiki, which continues to be populated with the massive amount of image data assembled during the course.
The students were guided in their experiments by experienced instructors from Dresden and elsewhere who had typically prior experience with light sheet technology. They were inspired by a star-studded speaker line-up which presented the bleeding edge of technology development in the light sheet microscopy field. Their technical talks were recorded and are made available to the scientific community through the wiki.
It has been exhilarating two weeks when everyone involved worked hard and played hard. Ernst Stelzer remarked in his opening lecture: "I have been a prophet of light sheet, you are the apostles, go spread the word." After the course we are certain that this is exactly what will happen.