It all started back in 2009, when the first, small, invitation only workshop on Light Sheet Fluorescence Microscopy (LSFM) was initiated at the MPI-CBG in Dresden, organized by the institute’s research group leader Pavel Tomancak and Emmanuel Reynaud from the University College Dublin. Back then, some 40 participants came to discuss the latest developments in this emerging field of fluorescence microscopy. Since then, the increasingly broad community of scientists involved in the development and application of LSFM has gathered yearly at the LSFM workshop that over time grew into a fully-fledged scientific conference.
This year marked the 10th Anniversary of Light Sheet Fluorescence Microscopy meetings and it was celebrated by bringing the conference ‘home’ to MPI-CBG. The conference took place from August 12-15, 2018. The original organizers, Pavel Tomancak and Emmanuel Reynaud, summoned with the generous support of German Research Foundation (DFG) 24 movers of the light sheet microscopy field to Dresden. The speakers attracted more than 200 registered participants from all over the world and 24 of them gave presentations selected from abstracts. Following the tradition of innovative conference formats at LSFM, all invited and selected speakers gave short 15-minutes presentations, a limit ruthlessly enforced by the session chairs and the feared Australian hat of Pavel Tomancak that landed on the head of any speaker going overtime. In addition, the companies presented their hardware during 11 short techno-bite talks and were able to showcase their set-ups to conference participants during two dedicated hands on sessions. There were almost 60 posters. Most importantly, since the conference immediately followed an EMBO funded Practical Course on Light Sheet Microscopy held in Dresden at MPI-CBG between August 2-11, the students of the course had an opportunity to present the results of their hard work to the conference participants in 16 exciting and extremely diverse flash talks.
Altogether, the program packed into two and a half days a whopping 75 scientific presentations resulting in a true festival of light sheet. The conference was running an active Twitter campaign showcasing the amazing science that modern light sheet technology enables. The Tweets can be followed under the hashtag #LSFM18 which gave at least the people in the Twittersphere a feeling that they were actually there.
It was a great conference and we are looking forward to another decade of light sheet community meetings.