An International Meeting on Biomedical Electron Microscopy Applications

Coimbra - Portugal, December 4th and 5th 2009

Dear Collegue,

We are pleased to invite you to an International meeting on Biomedical Electron Microscopy Applications. This year it will take place at IBILI - Faculdade de Medicina (FMUC), Coimbra, on the 4th and 5th of December of 2009. The meeting is a joint organization of the CQBFarma, SPMicros, FEUCP, iMed.UL, IBILI-FMUC and Hospital Curry Cabral.

Traditional TEM has emerged from the burst of technical development during the middle of the 20th century, and allowed a fair visualization of ultrastructural detail, from which new concepts in biology were obtained and a vast amount of information useful for research and diagnostic purposes was gathered.

By the end of the 20th century, the development and success of molecular biology accompanied by imunocytochemistry and confocal microscopy, combined by the perceived technical difficulty and long training periods required by electron microscopy  worked together to trigger a decline of the use of electron microscopy in biology. However, as addressed in the previous seminar (BioEM'08), TEM remains the only way to study biological structure at the macromolecular level and even the old EM techniques are crucial for obtaining essential data in many biomedical fields. The importance of TEM is further strengthened by immunocytochemical and micro-analytical methods that can be used to probe the chemical nature of the ultrastructural detail.

However, fixed embedded and stained samples, although able to produce aesthetically satisfying images are known to differ significantly from the living cell structure due to damage introduced by technical procedures.

Recent developments in electron microscopy address these problems by the development of cryo-fixation (vitrification) methods that are able to preserve almost instantaneously cell structure in a state as far as possible identical to the living state. Vitrification can be followed by cryo-substitution to produce resin embedded samples that can be sectioned at room temperature or by cryo-sectioning that can avoid most artefacts due to technical manipulations.

Three dimensional views of such close-to-native preparations can be obtained by electron tomography to study the structure of molecular machines. This allows direct visualization in a cellular context of the macromolecular samples allowing a high degree of integration among fast growing fields of research such as molecular biology and cell biology. Correlative methods of light and electron microscopy under development further contribute to relate molecular information obtained by the different methods.

These developments are contributing to place electron microscopy again in a new advancing frontier of knowledge that is expected to provide a deep insight into the organization and functioning of biological matter.

The Organizing Committee:

Filomena Caeiro - Faculty of Sciences, Lisbon University

Henrique Girão - IBILI - Faculty of Medicine, Coimbra University

A. P. Alves e Matos -  Curry Cabral Hospital, Lisbon (Chairperson)

Filipa Vale - Engineering Faculty, Portuguese Catholic University, Lisbon.

Jorge M.B. Vítor - CQBFarma and iMed.UL, Faculty of Pharmacy, Lisbon University