Reflecting on five years of FocalPlane

We are celebrating FocalPlane’s fifth birthday following its launch in 2020. The idea of launching a microscopy community site came from discussions between Journal of Cell Science’s (now former) Executive Editor Sharon Ahmad and Sean Munro, Head of Cell Biology at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge and a Company Director at The Company of Biologists. You can read the origin story in this post from Sharon, but, in a nutshell, JCS wanted to create a site that would be relevant to their community and hit on the idea of a microscopy-based community resource. At the same time, the need for such a resource was being proposed and discussed on X (then known as Twitter) by Ricardo Henriques, Christophe Leterrier and others. After receiving support from the board of Directors at The Company of Biologists and with engagement from microscopy community, FocalPlane was born.

The first Community Manager was Christos Kyprianou, who worked with the in-house team and our first Scientific Advisory Board, including Ricardo and Christophe, as well as Lucy Collinson, Florian Jug and Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, to build FocalPlane. Of course, people might remember there was another event that dominated 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated lockdowns. As researchers adjusted to working from home, perhaps unsurprisingly, FocalPlane’s first content was a post on lockdown from imaging facility managers from around the world. The early posts on FocalPlane covered some fundamental topics including resolution, fixation artifacts and bioimage analysis, as well as highlighting new work on open-source microscopy (openFrame & Flamingo) and expansion microscopy. Our first blog series were Technology highlights from Euro-Bioimaging and a blog series on LSFM from Elisabeth Kugler and Emmanuel Reynaud.

In early 2021, Christos passed the Community Manager baton on to Esperanza Agullo-Pascual, who started some new initiatives away from our bread-and-butter blog posts. This included launching our FocalPlane features… webinar series, with presentations from world-leaders in the microscopy community on hot topics in imaging. You can view the recordings of all our webinars on FocalPlane and on YouTube. We are continuing FocalPlane features… in 2025 with collaborations with MITOtalks and the membrane trafficking series, with for more announcements to come!

In 2022, we launched the FocalPlane Network, a database for researchers with imaging expertise. We are continuing to build the network and we hope that it will be a useful tool for anyone looking for a collaborator, a peer reviewer, a conference speaker and more! 2022 also saw the first posts in our most talked-about series, Latin American Microscopists from Mariana De Niz. So far, Mariana has published ~90 interviews in this series and highlighted researchers from many countries in Latin America. We are delighted to continue working with Mariana as one of the organisers of our upcoming Workshop in Ecuador.

In 2023, we announced a collaboration with MicroscopyDB to revamp our microscopy jobs and events boards, and join the community that helps drive developments in this space. We also announced our first cohort of FocalPlane correspondents, and we have continued this scheme in 2024 and 2025 – look out for a post about our correspondents later this year. Mara Lampert’s bioimage analysis series was our most read series in 2023 and we have consistently had fantastic posts introducing biologists to methods and tools in bioimage analysis.

Moving on to 2024, we also released a significant upgrade to our resources page, thanks to a collaboration with MicroList. We now host the MicroList resource database on FocalPlane and we are continuing to update these listings and encourage the community to do the same. We’ve also been increasing our offerings for the cell biology community, initially by launching cell biology specific jobs boards and event calendar. We’ll be developing our ‘cell biology corner’ throughout 2025.

It has been a fascinating process putting together this post as it has given us the opportunity to delve into the FocalPlane archive. While we have only been able to highlight the major events in the last five year, the amount and quality of the posts that our community have shared over the past five years is quite been astonishing. Indeed, it is a desire to ensure that this information is easily accessible that has fuelled our latest website upgrade. We now have a much improved search functionality on the website, including filters that allow users to search via keyword. Please have a look around and let us know if there are any problems that we need to iron out or any suggestions for future improvements. It is also now possible to search the gallery by biological category as well as microscope modality. The tagging process is still ongoing, so please bear with us while we go through the huge collection that you, our community have contributed.

Thanks for being part of the FocalPlane community, let’s work together to continue building a platform for the microscopy community over the next five years!

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