Lectures and Courses

Lectures

The core facility staff regularly holds lectures about microscopy topics, e.g. confocal microscopy. Target audience are the users of the core facility bioimaging, but everybody with interest is welcome.

See here for details on the July 2017, Fundamentals of Advanced Light Microscopy lectures

Practical course "Light microscopy, from bright field to multi-photon microscopy"

For several years now Steffen Dietzel teaches this two-week practical course for biology master students every year, currently in September. Thanks to the enhanced capacity due to the core facility, a few additional places could be created for doctoral students from the BMC.

Course Content: The students will learn the theory and practical application of light microscopic techniques, starting with the basics of “classic” techniques such as bright field Köhler Illumination, phase contrast, dark field, differential interference contrast (DIC) and fluorescence microscopy. We then move on to confocal laser scanning microscopy, multi-photon microscopy and super resolution microscopy.

These techniques are applied to a variety of samples including botanical specimens, fixed tissue sections, live cells and intravital microscopy.

Small groups of students will use image processing software to generate a presentation with the images and movies recorded. Apart from giving said presentation, each student will have to pass an oral examination on one of the topics of the course.

This is a 10 day course, set up with included lectures and seminar. The student has the opportunity to prepare and present a talk on one of the microscopic techniques in which case the course is counted as 6 ECTS. Otherwise it is a 3 ECTS course. The course will be in English, except all (!) participants should agree on German.

Qualification goals: With this broad overview the student will be capable to determine advantages and disadvantages of various light microscopic approaches for different experimental settings and thus to select and apply the best approach for a given question.

Research course: Advanced light microscopy

In this 12 SWS research course for biology master students, the student contributes to an ongoing research project of the lab. It will likely involve preparation of samples and will certainly involve one or several advanced light microscopy techniques, such as live cell, confocal, multi-photon or STED microscopy.