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October 6, 2010

PicoQuant’s Workshop on Single Molecule Spectroscopy brougth together top researchers

More than 150 participants came to Berlin to discuss latest results, projects and ideas

Pressefoto 16th WS 3The sixteenth International Workshop on Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Ultra Sensitive Analysis in the Life Sciences from September 15 to 17, 2010, organised by PicoQuant GmbH, brought together international top researchers in the field of ultrasensitive optical detection and single molecule spectroscopy and microscopy. More than 150 participants enjoyed 45 highly up-to-date talks, including lectures given by renowned scientists like Steven A. Soper, Paul R. Selvin and Gerhard J. Schütz. During the poster session with more than 50 scientific posters participants discussed latest results. Informal gatherings during the reception and a dinner lead to fruitful discussions about new ideas, projects and new networks.

Pressefoto 16th WS 1This years workshop focused on the current state of the art and recent news in the area of techniques, data analysis and applications based on single molecule spectroscopy. Special highlights were the presentations on Multispot FCS by Meike Kloster (Grenoble, France), 3D Tracking by Matthew D. Lew (Stanford, USA), Nuclear Pore Complex by David Grünwald (Delft, Netherlands) and Chaperone assisted folding by Hagen Hofmann, (Zurich, Switzerland). As super-resolution imaging still is a hot topic two sessions were dedicated to applications such as PALM, dSTORM, STED, SOFI, PhiLM and DSOM. The talks of John Eid (Menlo Park, USA) and Steven A. Soper (Baton Rouge, USA) even showed how single molecule techniques can already be used in non-university laboratory analysis (DNA sequencing) and in clinical diagnosis.

As in previous years PicoQuant awarded a special prize for the best student talk intending to support young scientists and to encourage them to present their work. Due to the high quality of the talks the nomination of a single winner proved again to be difficult. Finally the jury awarded the prize of 750 Euro to Lisa Marshall (Cambridge, USA) who gave a talk on "Extending single-molecule spectroscopy to nanosecond through millisecond time scales".

Pressefoto 16th WS 2The workshop closed with a brief review of 16 years of "Single Molecule Analysis through the eyes of the PicoQuant Single Molecule Workshop" by Steven A. Soper. His short statistics on papers, speakers and participants showed that, although the number of speakers and posters has only slightly grown over the years, the number of participants has increased strongly reaching more than 150 in each of the past two years. This indicates an increasing interest in the topics of the workshop. Soper also pointed out evolutions in the topics. While ten years ago "DNA sequencing" was a hot topic of active research, this has nowadays become an industrial tool as demonstrated this year by the talk of John Eid who works at Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc.. “PicoQuant's workshop has surely perpetuated the research in single molecule spectroscopy over the last 16 years,” Soper concluded.

The aim of PicoQuant's Workshop on Single Molecule Spectroscopy is to provide an interdisciplinary platform for users as well as developers from Physics, Chemistry and Biology to share their experience, exchange information and report their recent findings and developments in the rapidly evolving field of ultrasensitive optical detection and microscopy down to the single-molecule level. In 2011 the workshop takes place from September 7 to 9 in Berlin-Adlershof, Germany.

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