News and Press Releases

December 17, 2020

Season’s Greetings

The days are getting shorter and Santa’s little helpers are very busy wrapping up PicoQuant’s traditional Christmas presents for all of our employees’ children. As in previous years, we are also raising funds to support a charity. Our financial support will go to Unicef.

Have safe and happy happy Holidays as well as a joyful New Year 2021, everyone!

December 9, 2020

MicroTime 200 microscope for plant biology studies

A few research examples of our customers

In recent years, time-resolved methods such as FLIM, FRET-FLIM, and (scanning) FCS have been adopted for the study of plant biology. For example, the group of Thorsten Wohland used FCS to show that the disordered plant dehydrin Lti30 protects the membrane during water-related stress:
https://www.jbc.org/content/294/16/6468

Ikram Blilou, Yuchen Long, and colleagues employed FRET-FLIM to observe cell-type-specific transcription factor interactions in living Arabidopsis roots:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23317
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2018.00639/full

For others to follow in this path, Stefanie Weidtkamp-Peters, Grégoire Denay, and colleagues published a practical guide for fluorescent protein selection in plant FRET experiments:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pld3.189

And recently, the use of FRET-FLIM and scanning FCS as novel tools in plant biology to determine protein dynamics at cellular resolution was covered in the Annual Review of Plant Biology:
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-arplant-050718-100038

Fortunately, PicoQuant`s MicroTime 200 confocal microscope and LSM upgrade kits all enable the rapid acquisition of precise and quantitative FRET-FLIM data, and the MicroTime 200 even supports scanning FCS data acquisition:
Application website "Scanning Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (sFCS)"
Product website MicroTime 200
Product website LSM Upgrade Kit

November 30, 2020

LMA 2020 Image Competition: Congratulations, Aria Ahmed-Cox!

Australian PhD student wins the 1st prize with entry depicting vesicle trafficking in brain cancer cells on MicroTime 200

The winners of the 2020 Light Microscopy Australia Image Competition have been announced. Over 100 beautiful entries competed for the top spots in the four categories Live Cell, Life Science, In Vivo, and Materials Science. Congratulations to all winners of this years fierce competition!

Among all of the winning entries, we’d like to highlight the submission “The Paths we Trace: Lifetime of Fluorescent Membranes in Cancer” by Aria Ahmed-Cox, a PhD Student at the Children’s Cancer Institute of the University of New South Wales. In her short video, she traced vesicle trafficking in brain cancer cells on a MicroTime 200 time-resolved fluorescence microscope using PicoQuant’s rapidFLIM approach.

With this entry, she won the 1st prize in the Live Cell category.

Congratulations!

Aria Ahmed-Cox’ work was conducted in collaboration with the Children’s Cancer Institute, Biomedical Imaging Facility, Mark Wainwright Analytical Centre, UNSW Sydney and the Faculty of Medicine, UNSW Sydney. She and her group thank the Cancer Institute NSW for their generous support and acknowledge funding from the NHMRC Program Grant (APP1091261) and ARC Centre of Excellence in Convergent Bio-Nano Science and Technology (CE140100036).

November 26, 2020

Eight months of PicoQuant webinars – looking back and forwards

In March 2020, PicoQuant kicked off an ongoing series of webinars. Time for a short look back and at what’s coming next.

The events that started in early 2020 made it very difficult for us at PicoQuant to meet up in person with our customers and community. As staying in touch with people is very dear to our hearts, we turned to the next best thing: holding online gatherings. And thus, after a few weeks of frantic planning and preparations, our ongoing webinar series was born in mid-March 2020.

It’s been quite a ride: So far we’ve held 21 webinars and welcomed over 2400 attendees in total. Our goal is to provide the scientific community with deeper insights into techniques, methods, and applications. We’d like to give a big “thank you” to all participants for joining us and for all the lovely discussions. If you missed a session or wish to experience it again, then check out our webinar on demand page.

Going forward, we will continue to hold more webinars covering a broad range of topics. The next one on “Using pulsed laser light in your research – new application stories featuring PicoQuant’s picosecond pulsed lasers” will be held on December 2, 2020 by our laser product manager Guillaume Delpont. See you soon online!

November 25, 2020

PicoQuant’s Time-resolved Microscopy Course goes online

An in-depth introduction with lectures and practical sessions

PicoQuant’s 13th international course on “Time-resolved Microscopy and Correlation Spectroscopy” will be held as a fully interactive online event form March 2-5, 2021. The course provides an in-depth introduction to the world of time-resolved fluorescence microscopy with a focus on life science applications. The program combines lectures by experts in the field with practical sessions on systems from the market-leading companies Nikon, Olympus, Zeiss, and PicoQuant as well as opportunities for discussion and networking. Registration is open until January 31, 2021. The course is limited to 50 participants who will be assigned on a first-come first-served basis.