From 16 to 19 June 2026, the city of Coimbra will host the 26th edition of the European Light Microscopy Initiative Meeting (ELMI 2026).
The ELMI organizing committee is now pleased to announce that the session with Professor Edward Boyden (MIT, USA), a world pioneer in optogenetics and expansion microscopy, will be open to the entire scientific community interested in attending.
Edward Boyden will give his lecture, "Optical Tools for Understanding and Repairing Biological Systems", on the first day of the conference, June 16, from 6.30 to 7.30pm, in the Main Auditorium of Convento São Francisco.
ELMI is the main European forum for bioimaging and is jointly organised by PPBI – Portuguese Platform of Bioimaging and the University of Coimbra.
Short bibliography of Professor Edward Boyden here
Optical Tools for Understanding and Repairing Biological Systems
Analyzing, repairing, and simulating complex biological systems, require tools for systematically mapping, dynamically observing, and dynamically controlling these systems. We are discovering new molecular principles to enable such technologies. For example, we discovered that one can physically magnify biological specimens by synthesizing dense networks of swellable polymer throughout them, and then chemically processing the specimens to isotropically swell them. This method, which we call expansion microscopy, enables ordinary microscopes to do nanoimaging – important for mapping molecules throughout cells, tissues, and organs. As a second example, we serendipitously discovered that microbial rhodopsins, genetically expressed in neurons, could enable their electrical activity to be precisely controlled in response to light. These molecules, now called optogenetic tools, enable causal assessment of how neurons contribute to behaviors and pathological states, and are yielding new candidate treatment strategies for brain diseases. Finally, in order to reveal relationships between different molecular signals within a cell, we are developing spatial and temporal multiplexing strategies that enable many such signals to be imaged at once in the same living cell. We design all our tools to be easy to use, and we share all our tools as freely as possible. Scientifically, we are focusing on the integrated application of these tools to collect ground truth-oriented data for entire nervous systems, starting with C. elegans and the larval zebrafish, but with an eye to scaling to entire mouse brain and human brain, empowered in part by methods we are developing for making the living mammalian brain more transparent. Our goals include the understanding of brain aging, and the creation of biologically accurate computer simulations of entire brains.
