MIC Symposium 2026: Live cell imaging across scales

The Symposium of the Microscopy Imaging Center of the University of Bern 2026 is dedicated to "Live Cell Imaging Across Scales". Observing biological processes as they unfold in living cells, tissues and whole organisms requires methods that span many orders of magnitude in space and time, and the three sessions of the symposium follow this range from single synapses and gene loci to entire brains and complete life cycles. The first session is devoted to imaging of neuronal structure and function from the nano- to the mesoscale. It presents the latest advances in stimulated-emission-depletion (STED) microscopy in brain tissue, which resolves the finest morphological changes at synapses during learning and memory formation beyond the resolution limit of conventional light microscopes, and multiregional mesoscopic imaging, which captures the dynamics of and the communication between cortical areas with single-cell resolution. The second session turns to live imaging of development and gene regulation, where quantitative light microscopy makes transcription and the dynamics of chromatin structure directly measurable in single cells and links molecular events to cell fate decisions. The third session is dedicated to emerging techniques for in vivo imaging: longitudinal imaging that follows C. elegans continuously from hatching to death, functional ultrasound that records activation and functional connectivity across the entire brain of awake and behaving mice, and the combination of neuronal imaging with automated kinematic analysis of behavior to study pain. Together, the program spans super-resolution, mesoscopic, quantitative fluorescence and ultrasound imaging, and addresses biological questions reaching from synaptic plasticity and gene expression to development, behavior and systems neuroscience. 

• Jumana AjHaj Abed, PhD
  MPI, Freibung i.B., Germany
• Shuting Han, Dr
  University of Zurich, Switzerland
• Zsolt Lenkei, MD PhD
  INSERM, Paris, France
• Valentin Nägerl, Prof
  University of Göttingen, Germany
• Thomas Nevian, Prof
  University of Bern, Switzerland
• David Suter, Prof
  EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
• Benjamin Towbin, Prof
  University of Bern, Switzerland

• GMP SA
• Nikon Europe B.V. 
• Quantum Design SA
• Tomocube Europe GmbH
• Visitron Systems GmbH
• Witec AG