FocalPlane - Where biology meets microscopy

Welcome to FocalPlane

FocalPlane is a community site for anyone who uses microscopy in their research. It is a place where you can interact with a global community of imaging scientists, engineers, chemists, and bioimage analysts.

FocalPlane is your site and once registered, you are free to share a blog post, add an image to our gallery, post a job advert or put up an event listing.

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Recent posts

How to organise events more sustainably (webinar)

Posted by Teodora Andreea Rînciog, on 10 June 2025

We are pleased to support The Pavilion for People, running alongside the 2025 UN Ocean Conference. Explore the space to learn more and share your thoughts on saving our oceans. As part of The Pavilion for People, we will host a webinar on Thursday 12 June at 11am (BST) on ‘How to organise events more

MITOtalks and FocalPlane features… webinar – 3 July

Posted by FocalPlane, on 9 June 2025

We are delighting to announce that we are collaborating with MITOtalks on our upcoming webinar celebrating Journal of Cell Science’s Special Issue: Cell Biology of Mitochondria. MITOtalks organisers Nuno Raimundo and Sjoerd Wanrooij have invited the authors of three of the papers published in this issue to present their research. Thursday 3 July, 17:00 CEST,

Featured image with Rosa L. Salgado García

Posted by FocalPlane, on 6 June 2025

Our featured image, acquired by Rosa L. Salgado García, shows a histological section of female (above) and male (below) gonads at an advanced maturation stage of the simultaneous hermaphroditic scallop Nodipecten subnodosus. The image of the gonadic tissue was obtained using a microscope (Leica DM4B) connected to a digital camera (Leica, DMC2900) using LAS V

Annotating Images in Cellpose

Posted by Lea Kabjesz, on 5 June 2025

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to manually annotate cells in 2D and 3D images using the Cellpose Graphical User Interface (GUI). Manual annotation is a key step in many bioimage analysis workflows. It allows you to create labeled data that can serve as a reference for evaluating segmentation quality – or even

The Company of Biologists Workshop – Macro to Micro: Quantitative Plant Imaging Across Scales

Posted by FocalPlane, on 5 June 2025

Applications are open for funded places for early-career researchers (ECRs) to attend our Workshop on imaging across different spatial levels in plants. 10 ECRs will be selected to participate in the Workshop alongside the invited speakers.

Microscopy preprints – bioimage analysis

Posted by FocalPlane, on 30 May 2025

Here is a curated selection of preprints published recently (up until 22 May). In this post, we focus specifically on bioimage analysis and data management.

Workshop report: UC Berkeley’s Advanced Imaging Methods Workshop

Posted by Ben Cox, on 29 May 2025

I attended UC Berkeley’s Advanced Imaging Methods Workshop with goals of becoming more familiar with a) high resolution imaging methods and hardware I did not have access to at my home institution and b) image processing and analysis algorithms, especially those based on machine learning/AI. The workshop provided ample opportunity to fulfill both of these

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