EMBL is committed to sharing research advances and sustaining scientific interaction throughout the coronavirus pandemic. We are delighted to announce that the course is going virtual and invite you to join us online.
Course Overview
This five-day comprehensive online microscopy course focuses on stimulated emission depletion microscopy (STED) and its application to biological questions.
Through lectures, tutorials, demonstrations and practical workshops, the course provides in-depth knowledge on all aspects of STED Nanoscopy.
It covers the fundamentals of STED microscopy, different technical implementations and has a strong emphasis on sample preparation – including choice of fluorophores and refractive index matching, as well as image acquisition strategies for fixed samples and living cells. Students will have the opportunity for exercises on state-of-the-art STED microscopes in which they will acquire high quality nanoscopy data.
The faculty consists of Invited guest researchers, experts from the EMBL and Leica Microsystems.
In order to adapt to different time zones, the practical sessions will be run in 2 individual corridors:
- 2 groups in the morning (10:00 – 12:00 CEST)
- 2 groups in the late afternoon (16:30 – 18:30 CEST)
Presentations, tutorials and other activities for all participants will take place in a shared slot in-between the practicals: 13:00 – 16:00 (CEST).
Audience
This course is designed for researchers at the early stages of their career in the life sciences (e.g. pre or postdoctoral level), ideally with access to a STED microscope. The participants should have an immediate need to apply the trained skills for their biological questions. The course is strongly centered on practical aspects of STED microscopy and is therefore especially suited for people who rely on STED nanoscopy for their research.
Modules/Resources
The course will cover the entire range of skills needed to apply STED nanoscopy in biology. The following topics will be covered in lectures, tutorials as well as in practical workshops:
- Sample preparation for STED microscopy, including choice of fluorophores and refractive index matching
- Technical implementations – CW-STED, pulsed-STED, gated-STED, time-resolved STED (tauSTED)
- Multi-Color 2D and 3D STED microscopy
- Image acquisition strategies for live-cell STED
- STED Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (STED-FCS)
Learning Outcomes
At the end of the course, the participants will be able to design experiments using STED microscopy, prepare high-quality microscopy samples and acquire state-of-the-art nanoscopy images.
What Past Participants Say About the Course
“The course was well organised, extremely motivating and valuable. The course gave me the right tools and understanding to optimise super-resolution microscopy for my project.” – Ida Jentoft, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Germany
“A very well designed course for both beginners as well as for people who have prior experience working on STED/STORM imaging. It has a good balance of theory and practical sessions, and offers a unique chance to image your own samples after the course. Overall a great experience!” – Rukmini Mukherjee, Goethe University, Germany
“My research focus is on understanding Centrioles and Centrosomes in Drosophila. I actively employ SRM techniques in my research and was just learning about STED microscopy so the course supplemented and helped in my understanding and learning of this new microscopy technique.” – Pallavi Panda, University of Cambridge, UK