Albert Tousson's winning image in Nikon's 2004 Small World contest is of cultured baby hamster kidney cells.

Keeping on top of the field of microscopy drives researchers to mount an on-going quest to see the field in a more detailed light.

The light microscope’s strength and capability have increased considerably over the last decade. As a result, its significance in the lab has exploded in all fields of biological research including cell biology, physiology, and molecular biology.

This change is driving the need to study increasingly sophisticated problems at high spatial and temporal resolution. Scientific advances have been dependent on the development of entirely new microscopic methodologies.

To stay on top of the technology, researchers and scientists must continually charge ahead in their quest for knowledge. Many institutions provide courses and workshops to enable researchers in this endeavor.

• The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Mass., sponsors six major summer courses and about a dozen special topic courses annually. These intensive educational programs, each one to six weeks long, provide experience in specialized research techniques.

On May 9-18, MBL will be hosting an in-depth course on analytical and quantitative light microscopy, under the direction of Greenfield Sluder, professor at the Univ. of Massachusetts Medical Center, Worcester, and David Wolf, VP of R&D and chief scientific officer at Sensor Technologies LLC, Shrewsbury, Mass.

The course will include topics such as:
• Geometrical and physical optics of microscope image formation
• Interaction of light and matter
• Fluorescence microscopy, quantification of fluorescence, and green fluorescent protein (GFP)
• Ratiometric measurement of intracellular ion concentrations
• Confocal microscopy

Marine Biological Laboratory, www.mbl.edu

• The New York Microscopical Society (N.Y.M.S.), Montclair, N.J., will hold an advance course that includes lectures and hands-on labs covering:
• The nature of polarized light
• The origin and interpretation of interference colors, birefringence, and crystal orientation The workshops will be held every Saturday in May. Instructors include: Jan Hinsch, formerly of Leica Microsystems, Wetzlar, Germany; Mary McCann, McCann Imaging, Belmont, Mass.; and N.Y.M.S. instructor, Don O’Leary.

N.Y.M.S., www.nyms.org

• An intensive, hands-on training on multiple confocal microscopes equipped for stereology will be held on May 14-18 and Aug. 13-17 at the Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin Univ. of Medicine, Ill.

The purpose of this course is to provide a background in the theory and practice of modern histological preparation and microscopic analysis for researchers in biomedical science. It will include a practical tutorial in all aspects of microscopic analysis, experimental design, specimen preparation, use of fluorescence and confocal microscopes, design-based stereology, and image preparation for scientific publication. The lectures will focus on:
• Fundamentals of tissue preparation and staining, microscopy, and digital imaging
• Theory and practice of design-based stereology
• Tutorial on the new application of confocal stereology, illustrated through the quantitation of neural stem cells The instructor, Daniel A. Peterson, is an NIH-funded investigator in neural repair and stem cell biology.

Neuro Renew, www.neurorenew.com

• Providing an understanding of the concepts, instrumentation, and applications of scanning probe microscopy (SPM), Lehigh Microscopy School at Lehigh Univ., Bethlehem, Pa., is hosting SPM: From Fundamentals to Advanced Applications on June 4-8.

The course will cover atomic force and scanning tunneling microscopy and will feature advanced techniques for imaging and measuring electronic, magnetic and mechanical properties, including nanoindentation. Special attention will be paid to instrumental artifacts and methods to avoid them. The lectures will cover a range of applications in physical and biological sciences and engineering. Hands-on laboratory exercises are used extensively throughout the course. Lecturers include: Dawn Bonnell, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and Sergei Kalinin, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tenn.

Lehigh Microscopy School, www.lehigh.edu

• Supported by funds from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, N.Y., will hold an intensive laboratory and lecture course on the imaging structure and function in the nervous system, from July 24 – Aug. 13.

The principal focus of the course will be on vital light microscopy, as well as the use of electronic cameras, laser scanning systems, functional fluorophores, delivery techniques, and digital image-processing software. In addition, the course will examine a variety of molecular probes of cell function, including calcium-sensitive dyes, voltage-sensitive dyes, photo-activated compounds, and exocytosis tracers. Strong emphasis will be placed on multi-photon laser scanning microscopy and biological fluorophores, GFP, and its variants. The instructors are: Florian Engert, associate professor of molecular and cellular biology, Harvard Univ. Cambridge, Mass.; Mark Hubener, Max-Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Germany; David Kleinfeld, principal investigator, Univ. of California, San Diego; and Jack Waters, assistant professor of physiology, Northwestern Univ., Chicago, Ill.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, http://meetings.cshl.edu/courses.html

• The McCrone Research Institute, a not-for-profit corporation, offers a variety of microscopy classes, including applied infrared microspectroscopy, microscopy of explosives, scanning electron, polarized light, and forensic paint microscopy. More than 45 classes are held at its campus in Chicago and on-site at host organizations in government, industry, and academia.

According to Kelly Brinsko, research microscopist and instructor at the institute, the class sizes are generally small which encourage additional personal attention, and as such give the instructors the flexibility to custom-design any course to suit the needs of the students.

McCrone Research Institute, www.mcri.org

For additional information, Nestor J. Zaluzec, principal investigator at Argonne National Laboratory, Ill, and member of the Microscopy Siciety of America’s education, standards, program, and telecommunication committee has put together a Web page of links to universities and education sites for microscopy and microanalysis at www.amc.anl.gov/Docs/NonANL/EduSites.html. In addition, Zaluzec can be reached at zaluzec@aaem.amc.anl.gov.