3rd Course on Principles and Applications of Time-Resolved Fluorescence Spectroscopy

Course Chairman: Rainer Erdmann, PicoQuant GmbH

Summary

This course was held in Europe for the third time and was a great success. Altogether 82 people from universities and industry from more than 18 countries participated. They attended 15 lectures and 3 hands-on experiment sessions with 12 different instruments from 5 companies, covering different methods and procedures in fluorescence spectroscopy.

Aims and Purpose

The course is intended for individuals wishing an in-depth introduction to the principles of fluorescence spectroscopy and its applications to the Life Sciences. Attendees are typically professionals who are using or intend to use fluorescence in their research. Most attendees have some knowledge of fluorescence, typically in a specialized area. However, other individuals, from totally different research areas and industry, get the opportunity to enter this exciting field in a very effective way and benefit especially from the experimental section.

Course instructors

Joseph R. Lakowicz, Professor of Biochemistry and Director of the Center for Fluorescence Spectroscopy
Zygmunt "Karol" Gryczynski, Professor at the Department of Molecular Biology and Immunology at the University of North Texas
Rainer Erdmann, Managing Director of the R&D company PicoQuant GmbH and specialist in ultrasensitive fluorescence analysis
Matthias Patting, Senior Scientist at PicoQuant GmbH and specialist in software design for time-correlated single photon counting instrumentation
Michael Wahl, Senior Scientist at PicoQuant GmbH and specialist in instrumentation for time-correlated single photon counting

Guest lecturers (in alphabetical order)

Manfred Auer, Head of Innovative Screening Technologies (IST) at the Novartis Lead Discovery Center, as well as lecturer for Biophysical Chemistry at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He specializes in the development of novel drug discovery technologies.
Peter Czerney, CEO of Dyomics, a company that develops, produces and distributes new functional fluorophores, chromophores, and resulting kits for life science.
Jörg Enderlein, Head of the Single Molecule Detection group at FZ Jülich, Germany. He specializes in Single Molecule Detection, Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS) and complex data analysis.
Lars Kastrup, Member of the High Resolution Optical Microscopy Group at Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany. He specializes in new methods for microscopy with improved resolution and other innovative forms of biological imaging.
Martin Hof, Head of the Biospectroscopy Laboratory at the J. Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry, Prague, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He specializes in the application of various fluorescence spectroscopy techniques for the study of biologically relevant processes.

Course organisation

The lectures on Monday and Tuesday dealt with basic principles of fluorescence spectroscopy, while from Wednesday to Friday more specialized topics were covered:

Monday and Tuesday - Principles of Fluorescence Spectroscopy

These lectures dealt with the basics of steady-state and time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy and instrumentation. They covered time- and frequency-domain measurements, anisotropy, solvent effects, quenching and Förster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET), as well as an introduction into data analysis.

Wednesday to Friday - Time-Resolved Fluorescence Spectroscopy: Principles, Instrumentation and Applications

These lectures emphasised time-resolved fluorescence along with advanced applications of fluorescence in biophysics, sensing, imaging, clinical chemistry, multi-photon excitation and ultrasensitive detection. Guest lectures were given on various topics, like fluorescence microscopy, multi-photon microscopy, correlation spectroscopy, single molecule detection and fluorescence markers.

Apart from the lectures, hands-on experimentation (steady-state and time-resolved experiments as well as data analysis) was offered on various instruments provided by market leading companies.

Hands-on Experimentation

The following companies offered hands-on experimentation:

Olympus	Horiba Jobin Yvon	PicoQuant	PicoQuant

Edinburgh Instruments	Varian	PicoQuant	Tecan

Program

The program and the time schedule is available for download as a pdf document:

Previous Courses

The European short course on "Principles and Applications of Time-Resolved Fluorescence Spectroscopy" is an annual event since 2003. For further details about each year's event, please select the year from the list below.