Single Molecule Workshop
25th International Anniversary Workshop on
“Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Super-resolution Microscopy in the Life Sciences”
September 3-6, 2019 in Berlin, Germany
Summary
Over 230 scientists from all over the world joined PicoQuant to celebrate the Workshop’s 25th anniversary in Berlin from September 3 to 6, 2019. The attendees, ranging from famous, well-established researchers to young, upcoming enthusiastic scientists, gathered to report on and discuss the latest developments in the field of Single Molecule Detection (SMD) and advanced microscopy techniques.
The scientific program of the 25th anniversary wokrshop included 23 keynote and invited lectures by renowned speakers, 32 contributed talks, and more than 110 posters. The call for papers was so incredibly successful that many excellent applications for oral presentations had to be switched to posters. However, four "flash talk" sessions were introduced where selected authors could give a short oral preview of their poster.
Among this year’s scientific highlights were the talks by Nobel prize laureates Stefan Hell and W.E. Moerner, which gave an in-depth review of the development of optical super-resolution microscopy in the last 30 years and where the field might be heading next. In his closing remarks, W.E. Moerner thanked attendees and organizers alike: “Thank you, Rainer and our friends at PicoQuant, for nurturing and enabling so much of this important field of science!”
The meeting featured many other exciting contributions such as an invited presentation by Aleksandra Radenovic (EPFL, Switzerland) on using SMD to study luminescent defects in atomically thin 2D materials or a poster by Julia Heiby (Julius-Maximilian Universität Würzburg, Germany) which focused on studying the interactions between proteins in spider silk. Many contributions illustrated the fact that the field , while mature, is still growing. New methods such a MINFLUX, Metal Induced Energy Transfer (MIET), and Pulse Interleaved Excitation (PIE) becoming mainstream. In parallel, the focus of the community is moving towards even more applications in life and materials science, focusing on quantification of proteins, fluorophores, energy harvesting material, or using gold in its many nanoscopic forms for local optical enhancement.
“It is a great pleasure to not only see so many good friends but also enthusiastic young researchers attending this year’s workshop”, says Rainer Erdmann, Managing Director of PicoQuant, “Today, the meeting has established itself as the leading platform to promote the field of single molecule research and advanced microscopy techniques. It has become a kind of family event for many participants.” Besides the exciting scientific program, attendees celebrated an anniversary party at the stadium of the local soccer team 1. FC Union, the “Alte Försterei”. The party program offered, besides a dinner buffet, sports and games, a guided tour through the stadium as well as a music band formed by PicoQuant employees playing live on stage.
During the workshop, PicoQuant had the chance to conduct interviews with some of the leading researchers in single molecule research. Please see the video section of our website.
Open afternoon on Wednesday, September 4
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the workshop, PicoQuant invited the public to join the workshop for free during the afternoon of Wednesday, September 4, 2019. Around 20 visitors took the opportunity to listen to a series of talks by reknown scientists and to participate in a poster session as well as product presentations by PicoQuant. A special highlight of this Open Afternoon was a keynote lecture by Nobel laureate Stefan W. Hell entitled “Optical microscopy: the resolution revolution”.
Keynote speakers
Stefan Hell
Max-Planck-Institute, Germany
"Optical microscopy: the resolution revolution"
W.E. Moerner
Stanford University, USA
"Thirty Years of Single Molecules, from Early Low Temperatures to 3D Super-Resolution Nanoscopy and Tracking in Cells: What’s Next?"
Xiaoliang Sunney Xie
Peking University, China
"Insights from High Precison Single Cell Genomics"
Toshio Yanagida
Osaka University, Japan
"Single Molecule Study on how Muscle Works"
Invited speakers
Manfred Auer
University of Edinburgh, UK
"The linear phase of α-synuclein oligomerization, key driver of Parkinson's disease, revealed by a confocal fluorescence on-bead assay and by single molecule microscopy"
Christian Eggeling
Friedrich‐Schiller‐University, Germany
"Dissecting Molecular Membrane Organization - a Super-resolution Fluorescence Spectroscopy Story"
Jörg Enderlein
Georg-August-University, Germany
"Metal Induced Energy Transfer (MIET) Imaging"
Paul French
Imperial College London, UK
"Multidimensional and Super-resolved Fluorescence Imaging and High Content Analysis"
Johan Hofkens
KU Leuven, Belgium
"Identifying Microbiome Species by Single-Molecule Superresolved DNA Mapping and Resampling Statistics"
Michel Orrit
Leiden University, Netherlands
"Optical Studies of Single Molecules With Single Gold Nanoparticles"
Aleksandra Radenovic
EPFL, Switzerland
"A Nanoscopy of 2D materials"
Rudolf Rigler
Karolinska Institute, Sweden
"Single Molecules, Fluctuations and Memory"- Markus Sauer
University Würzburg, Germany
"Single-Molecule Localization Microscopy: Where Next?" 
Claus Seidel
Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany
"Super-resolution FRET Microscopy Reaches Molecular Resolution"
Thomas Schmidt
Leiden University, Netherlands
"Repetitive switching between DNA binding modes enables target finding by the glucocorticoid receptor"
Ben Schuler
University of Zurich, Switzerland
"Probing Intrinsically Disordered Proteins and Their Interaction Mechanisms With Single-Molecule Spectroscopy"
Gerhard Schütz
Vienna University of Technology, Austria
"Single Molecule Microscopy to Measure Forces in the Immunological Synapse"
Sang-Hee Shim
Korea University, Korea
"Ultrastructural Dynamics of Genomic Loci in Live Cells"
Hari Shroff
National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, USA
"Accelerating Deconvolution and Multiview Registration in Fluorescence Microscopy"
Ron Walsworth
Harvard University, USA
"Quantum diamond sensors for life science applications"
Shimon Weiss
University of California Los Angeles, USA
"Advances in inorganic voltage nanosensors"
Katrin Willig
MPI, Germany
"Intravital STED microscopy of the synapse"
Jörg Wrachtrup
University of Stuttgart, Germany
"Nanoscale Quantum Sensing for Life Science"
Emeritus guests
Frans de Schryver
KU Leuven, Belgium
Student award
PicoQuant especially wants to encourage young scientists to present their work. Therefore, the jury - consisting of the invited speakers and PicoQuant's managing director Rainer Erdmann - evaluated the presentations given by students. Selecting a single winner from this year’s outstanding 15 contributions proved to be so challenging that the jury decided to nominate three winners.
The 1500 Euro prize was split between Arindam Ghosh (University of Göttingen, Germany) for his talk on “graphene based metal induced energy transfer for sub-nanometer optical localization”, Kristyna Holanova (Institute of Photonics and Electronics of the CAS, Czech Republic) for her work on “revealing single-protein function by high-speed tracking of individual domains”, and Tim Schröder (University of Munich, Germany) for his presentation on “following the fate of excitions in multi-chromophoric nanoparticles”.
Archive
The workshop on "Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Ultra Sensitive Analysis in the Life Sciences" is an annual event since 1995. To get an impression of our Single Molecule Workshops have a look at the video below and check our archive of past events.
Summaries and impressions of past workshops:
Workshop impressions
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