Meeting report: First light sheet based fluorescence microscopy workshop

Abstract

In Jena, at the turn of the century, Richard Zsig-mondy (1865–1929), working together with thephysicist Heinrich Siedentopf, had the brilliantidea to use a light sheet to illuminate from the sidethe colloid solution they were investigating [1].From there the idea of light sheet illumination van-ished from the scientific spotlight until it was re-vived it in the 90’s as Orthogonal-Plane Fluores-cence Optical Sectioning (ORFOS) [2] and thetaconfocal microscopy [3]. At the beginning of thenew millennium, Ernst Stelzer and colleagues de-veloped Selective Plane Illumination Microscopy(SPIM) and applied it to live imaging of model or-ganism embryos [4,5].Since then the light-sheet il-lumination approach proved instrumental for awide variety of biological disciplines ranging frommarine biology [6], to fundamental developmental[7,8] and cell biology research questions [9,10].Yetthe technology remains largely confined to the lab-oratories that orchestrated its revival and the ben-efits of light sheet illumination are inaccessible tothe broad scientific community. It was the purposeof the First Light Sheet based Fluorescence Mi-croscopy workshop to bring together the key play-ers in the light sheet technology and to establish ef-fective communication among them that will hope-fully lead to better integration of light sheet mi-croscopy into scientific mainstream. It is symbolicthat the workshop took place at the Max Planck In-stitute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics(MPI-CBG) in Dresden only some 100 miles awayfrom Jena where it all started.The workshop aimed at founding a communityand to encourage communication and sharing be-tween the different groups developing, using orsimply interested in this technology for their re-search. In preparation for the workshop we estab-lished a Wiki where every invited participant coulddescribe his research and sign up for a presenta-tion in one of the sessions (https://spim.mpi-cbg.de).This self-organizing approach worked verywell, as most of the participants were in fact pre-senting in the session of their choice and all speak-ers received equal amount of time to present theirdata.The presentations were divided in three mainsections: