Through the glass brightly. ELMI workshop on advanced light microscopy.

Abstract

The meeting was organized by Christian Boulin (Heidelberg, Germany), Jan Ellenberg (Heidelberg, Germany), Alberto Luini (Chieti, Italy), Agnes de Matteis (Heidelberg, Germany), Tommy Nilsson (Heidelberg, Germany) and Rainer Pepperkok (Heidelberg, Germany), and all members of the European Light Microscopy Initiative (ELMI), a forum initiated by scientists with an interest in the development of novel approaches in light microscopy. ELMI had previously met with leaders of the light microscopy and imaging industry, to discuss new developments and effective means of making advanced light microscopy more accessible to the European research community. One avenue towards this goal is the organization of meetings at which advanced approaches to microscopy and their applications are present. The meeting in Italy was the first of its kind. ![][1] In his 1960 movie ‘Through the glass darkly’ , Ingmar Bergman took a focused look into the lives of his sad and complex characters. The first International Meeting & Workshop on Advanced Light Microscopy (ALM), which took place at the Mario Negri Sud Institute in Santa Maria Imbaro, Italy in June 2001, provided a very bright look ‘through the glass’, giving new insights into the inner lives of cells. As highlighted at the meeting, biological research is currently in great need of new approaches and tools with which to study molecular events in live cells and organisms. Evidently, the cell is highly compartmentalized, maintaining diverse and complex molecular microenvironments that cannot be discerned through standard biochemical approaches, which lack the necessary spatial and temporal resolution. Tools that surpass the current limitations are particularly important in the current ‘post‐genomic era’, with a huge body of structural information available and the obvious next step being to determine how this complex ensemble functions in the live cell. For this mission, one needs the kind of high‐resolution approaches that advanced light microscopy is … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif