A one day meeting on Friday 3rd November, 2006 in London
 

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Meeting Highlights

Endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi body and cytoskeletal dynamics in the plant cell

Dr John Runions, Oxford Brookes University, UK

Components of the plant secretory pathway are highly dynamic.  Proteins shuttle from the ER through the Golgi bodies to their cellular destinations and back.  A good deal of effort is going into the search for the mechanisms of organellar dynamics.  We mark various sub-cellular components with fluorescent proteins to study interactions.  I will focus on interactions between the ER, Golgi bodies and the actin cytoskeleton. Motion tracking software allows us to collect enough data on Golgi body dynamics that we can work towards a statistical description of how they move relative to the ER.

 

Live cell confocal imaging: a view from the trenches

Dr Tim Self, University of Nottingham, UK

This talk will consist of a brief description of confocal microscopy and fluorescence. I will then describe the conditions required to image healthy living cells and finish with some of the live cell projects I am involved in at the ICS.

 

High Resolution Structured Illumination Microscopy

Dr Rainer Heintzmann, Kings College London, UK

In structured illumination the sample is illuminated with a number of different patterns of light. In our case this is a series of sinusoidal grids at different grid positions and orientations. Experimental datasets acquired under these conditions and reconstructed results from these data, demonstrating a resolution improvement of up to a factor of two over standard widefield microscopy are presented.  The non-linear approach of saturating optical transitions (for structured illumination as well as beam-scanning approaches) has a great potential especially in combination with photo-switchable dyes such as the recently released DRONPA protein by Atsushi Miyawaki's group.

 

Monitoring ion concentrations using the laser-scanning confocal microscope

Dr Paul Thomas, University of East Anglia, UK

Emphasis will be placed on the practical aspects of imaging ions and small molecules in live cells. In particular, I will present some lessons learnt from monitoring cytosolic calcium in an intact tissue (the human lens), and from the measurement of pH in lysosomal/endosomal compartments in macrophages.

 

Using bleaching techniques to study protein dynamics in living cells

Dr. Gareth Howell, University of Leeds, UK

This will be a brief overview into cell bleaching techniques employed in microscopy and a discussion of how these techniques have been used to study protein dynamics within live cells.

 

Advanced microscopy solutions for monitoring the kinetics and impact of drug-DNA targeting in living cells

Dr Errington, University of Cardiff, Wales

Quantification and exploration of drug targeting dynamics can be highly informative in the rational development of new therapies and in the drug discovery pipeline. The problems faced include the potential infrequency and transient nature of critical events, the influence of micro-pharmacokinetics on the drug-target equilibria, the dependence on preserving cell function to demonstrate dynamic processes in situ, the need to map events in functional cells and the confounding effects of cell-to-cell heterogeneity. This talk addresses key design concepts for the development of imaging tools used to uncover the complexity of drug-targeting in single cells

 

Additional confirmed speakers

Dr Treanor, Imperial College, London, UK

 

 

Registration fees

·       Standard fee - £480

·       Academic fee - £240

·       Student fee - £140

·       IBMS members fee - £240

 

If you register before September 20th 2006 you will get a 50% reduction in the above fees

 

 

Abstract submission

The Deadline for abstract submissions is September 10th 2006

Abstract guidelines can be found at http://www.euroscicon.com/absguidlines.html

 

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