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

New insights into corneal development from vEM

Posted by Mario Elias Ortega Sandoval, on 17 June 2025

by Rob Young*, Kiranjit Bains*, Phil Lewis* and Andrew Quantock* *Biophysics Research Group, School of Optometry & Vision Sciences, Cardiff University, UK Challenge The unique transparency of corneal stromal tissue, essential for vision, is dependent upon the remarkable order of component collagen fibrils, which exhibit highly uniform diameter, spacing and orientation. However, processes involved in

An interview with Andrew Porter, Research Integrity and Training Advisor

Posted by Helen Zenner, on 16 June 2025

Andrew Porter is the Research Integrity and Training Advisor at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute within the University of Manchester. Andrew worked for many years as a cell biology research scientist before moving into his role in research integrity. I caught up with Andrew over Zoom to learn more about his career path, what

Microscopy preprints – new tools and techniques in imaging

Posted by FocalPlane, on 13 June 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! IntAct-U-ExM: Ultrastructure Expansion microscopy of actin networks via an internally-tagged actinAnubhav Dhar, Nishaant Kumar Palani Balaji, Sanjana Mullick, Sucheta Dey, Angana Ghosh, Deepak

How to organise events more sustainably (webinar)

Posted by Teodora Andreea Rînciog, on 10 June 2025

We are pleased to support The Pavilion for People, running alongside the 2025 UN Ocean Conference. Explore the space to learn more and share your thoughts on saving our oceans. As part of The Pavilion for People, we will host a webinar on Thursday 12 June at 11am (BST) on ‘How to organise events more

MITOtalks and FocalPlane features… webinar – 3 July

Posted by FocalPlane, on 9 June 2025

We are delighting to announce that we are collaborating with MITOtalks on our upcoming webinar celebrating Journal of Cell Science’s Special Issue: Cell Biology of Mitochondria. MITOtalks organisers Nuno Raimundo and Sjoerd Wanrooij have invited the authors of three of the papers published in this issue to present their research. Thursday 3 July, 17:00 CEST,

Featured image with Rosa L. Salgado García

Posted by FocalPlane, on 6 June 2025

Our featured image, acquired by Rosa L. Salgado García, shows a histological section of female (above) and male (below) gonads at an advanced maturation stage of the simultaneous hermaphroditic scallop Nodipecten subnodosus. The image of the gonadic tissue was obtained using a microscope (Leica DM4B) connected to a digital camera (Leica, DMC2900) using LAS V

Annotating Images in Cellpose

Posted by Lea Kabjesz, on 5 June 2025

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to manually annotate cells in 2D and 3D images using the Cellpose Graphical User Interface (GUI). Manual annotation is a key step in many bioimage analysis workflows. It allows you to create labeled data that can serve as a reference for evaluating segmentation quality – or even

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