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

Featured image with Aswathy G Krishnan

Posted by FocalPlane, on 10 October 2025

Our featured image, acquired by Aswathy G Krishnan, depicts a neural rosette of a cerebral organoid derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC). The organoids were collected, fixed, dehydrated, embedded in tissue freezing media and cryosectioned at 20 µm thickness. Then, the sections were immunolabelled and imaged under confocal microscope at 60X magnification. The

Image Analysis course with Fiji/ImageJ

Posted by Lior Pytowski, on 8 October 2025

We would like to invite you to an online course introducing you to the basics of image analysis, including automatic segmentation, colocalisation, denoising, 3D, etc. We scheduled two new sessions: November 2025 session: more details and sign up here.(Nov 10th to Nov 14th 2025, in the mornings) December 2025 session: more details and sign up

Africa Microscopy Initiative redistributes research-grade light microscopes to four African institutions

Posted by Africa Microscopy Initiative, on 7 October 2025

Four research institutions in Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Ethiopia have been selected to each receive a microscope for advancing scientific research in Africa.

NeuroBio UK 2025: Insights, Innovation, and Inspiration in Neuroscience

Posted by Sally Horton, on 6 October 2025

I recently had the fantastic experience of attending the NeuroBio UK Conference at the National STEM Learning Centre in York. It was an inspiring gathering of neuroscience researchers, imaging experts, and innovators, all sharing cutting-edge insights and ideas. This post comes a little late, partly because I’ve been buried in experiments and grant writing, and

Microscopy preprints – bioimage analysis

Posted by FocalPlane, on 3 October 2025

Here is a curated selection of preprints published recently. In this post, we focus specifically on bioimage analysis and data management.

Featured image with Kaiden Power

Posted by FocalPlane, on 26 September 2025

Our featured image, acquired by Kaiden Power, shows the head and probolae of an Acrobeles complexus nematode. The cuticle furrows (annuli) and cilia pores are stained with Concanavalin A (red). The sample was mounted and imaged live on a DeltaVision widefield microscope with deconvolution post-acquisition.

FocalPlane features… preLights recording

Posted by FocalPlane, on 25 September 2025

In our FocalPlane features… preLights webinar, Felipe Del Valle Batalla and Vibha Singh presented live preLights highlighting preprinted research from Carmen Rodilla-Ramírez, Francesca Bottanelli and colleagues on the link between T-cell protrusions and CAR signalling, and from Eva Mejía-Ramírez, Carolina Florian and colleagues on the role of RhoA in stem cell ageing

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