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

Microscopy preprints – applications in biology

Posted by FocalPlane, on 31 October 2025

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

UK Bioimaging Launches User Access Fund for Researchers

Posted by Georgina Fletcher, on 31 October 2025

Five-year initiative provides up to £5,000 per application for access to cutting-edge bioimaging facilities UK researchers now have unprecedented access to state-of-the-art bioimaging technologies through a new fund announced by the UK Node of Euro-BioImaging. The UK Bioimaging User Access Fund, supported by £1.8 million in strategic funding from UKRI-BBSRC and UKRI-MRC over five years,

Volume EM Visualization of 3D Synaptic Ultrastructure in Postmortem Human Prefrontal Cortex

Posted by Janithri Wickramanayake, on 31 October 2025

by J.R. Glausier1, M. Maier1, J. Kozel1, C. Bouchet-Marquis2, K. Wu2, et al., 1University of Pittsburgh and 2Thermo Fisher Challenge Synaptic function and ultrastructure are intrinsically coupled; thus, volume electron microscopy (vEM) offers the ability to quantitatively interrogate multiple ultrastructural correlates of function within the individual synapses that populate a brain volume. By applying vEM

Microscopy preprints – new tools and techniques in imaging

Posted by FocalPlane, on 22 October 2025

Here is a curated selection of preprints posted recently on new tools and techniques in imaging. Let us know if we are missing any recent preprints that are on your reading list!

Imaging with A*STAR Microscopy Platform

Posted by FocalPlane, on 15 October 2025

In our ‘Imaging with…’ blog post, we meet the staff of the A*STAR Microscopy Platform in Singapore.

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

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