Optical biochemical and chemical sensors – Europt(r)ode VIII

Abstract

Biochemical and chemical sensors have attracted increasing interest in academia and industry in recent years, because of their large number of applications and their importance in research. In 1992, therefore, a European conference on optical sensing was started. This now attracts participants not only from Europe, but also from Asia and America. This conference, which is held every other year, was organized for the first time by Professor Otto Wolfbeis in Graz, followed by Florence, Zurich, Munster, Lyon, Manchester, and Madrid. This year, Europt(r)ode VIII was held in Tubingen, from 2–5 April, and attracted more than 250 scientists from throughout the world. Forty-six oral presentations were given. These provided overviews of, and trends in, optical sensor principles, especially transduction principles and different sensitive layers. These lectures covered high-quality applications in the monitoring of environmental processes, in process control, in food analysis, in medical diagnostics, in bioanalysis, and even in extra-terrestrial research. More than 100 posters were displayed, offering an additional opportunity, especially for young scientists, to develop contacts with people in academia and industry. Approximately 30% of the participants were students working on their PhD thesis. The eighteen invited lectures included scientific progress reports, reviews on detection techniques, evaluation of sensing methods for different applications, rating of sensors in comparison with classical analysis, techniques for miniaturisation and parallelisation, micro-fluidics, and applications of protein–protein interactions. Besides these typical sensor topics, the objective of some invited lectures was to offer those working with sensors summaries of related research fields. Therefore, speakers were invited to report on nuclear receptor signalling, the success story of piezo effects in fuel injectors in automobiles, and sophisticated data treatment using supervised and non-supervised training methods. On the web the conference programme can be viewed at http://barolo.ipc.unituebingen.de/europtrode/main.html. Some of the lectures can be seen as movies on the special server of the University of Tubingen TIMMS, at http://timms.uni-tuebingen.de/Themen/ Themen.aspx#Chemie. When the organizers asked the lecturers to provide review articles and original papers, the typical problems associated with such types of special issue became apparent. Lecturers presenting reviews only rarely find the time required to write a brief critical review, and many presentations which were very interesting to the audience, because they covered the latest research results, were not suitable for publication as an original paper. It is the editorial policy of Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry that all submissions to special issues face the same critical peer-review process as regular submissions to the journal. The number of papers accepted in time for publication in this special issue is modest. Nevertheless, the articles Anal Bioanal Chem (2006) 386:1199–1200 DOI 10.1007/s00216-006-0770-1