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.

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Recent posts

Featured image with Denise Scuffi

Posted by FocalPlane, on 30 January 2026

Our featured image, acquired by Denise Scuffi, shows stomata – small pores surrounded by a pair of specialised cells known as guard cells – from Arabidopsis thaliana expressing the fluorescent biosensor roGFP2-Orp1 in the cytosol, which enables in vivo monitoring of intracellular H₂O₂ dynamics.

JCS snapshot: Tracking coordinated cellular dynamics in time-lapse microscopy with ARCOS.px

Posted by FocalPlane, on 29 January 2026

In our latest JCS snapshot we hear from Maciej Dobrzyński, who, together with Benjamin Grädel and colleagues, developed ARCOS.px, a software tool to automatically identify and track coordinated dynamic cellular events in time-lapse microscopy movies.

Seeing Chromatin Scaling with Cell Size, from Interphase to Mitosis

Posted by Manuel Mendoza, on 26 January 2026

Melike Lakadamyali, Jérôme Solon and Manuel MendozaAs cells divide during development, their size evolves dramatically while DNA content remains constant. This raises a fundamental question: does chromosome compaction adjust to these size changes so that genomes are still segregated faithfully? This question has been with us for a long time. More than a decade ago,

Connecting at GloBIAS Kobe

Posted by Beatriz Serrano-Solano, on 26 January 2026

This article was written by Eric Hidari, Senior Bioinformatician at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK. Why would one attend an academic conference? In the past, I attended them without thinking much about the reason – being in academia, it feels like part of the job to learn, present, and network in such situations.

Microscopy preprints – applications in biology

Posted by FocalPlane, on 23 January 2026

Here is a curated selection of preprints published recently. In this post, we share preprints that use microscopy tools to answer questions in biology.

Imaris – 3D image visualization and analysis course report

Posted by Quentin LEBEL, on 23 January 2026

I attended a training session at the Bordeaux Faculty to learn how to use IMARIS, a software designed for viewing, measuring, and analyzing 3D microscopy images. The training, organized by the Bordeaux Imaging Center (BIC), was structured to first provide an overview of the software’s broad capabilities and then dig into more specific applications tailored

My participation at the GloBIAS Conference 2025 in Kobe Japan

Posted by Beatriz Serrano-Solano, on 22 January 2026

This article was written by Dr Libert Brice Tonfack, Associate Professor in Plant Biotechnologies at the University of Yaounde I, Cameroon. Upon returning from my active participation in the first conference organized by the Global Bioimage Analysts’ Society (GloBIAS) in 2024 in Gothenburg, Sweden, I immediately understood that I needed to commit strongly to the

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