JPK announces symposia developments

JPK Instruments has hosted its eighth annual symposium on the applications of scanning probe microscopy (SPM) alongside the second annual symposium on optical tweezers.

The symposia were held on the 14-15 October in Berlin at the Umspannwerk Ost centre, with more than 130 attendees participating over the two-day programme.

Leading professors including Juergen Rabe (Humboldt University, Berlin) and Daniel Mueller (TU Dresden) gave their high stand of review, while a young postgraduate student, Patrick Bosshart from Basel University, provided an insight on what to learn from force spectroscopy when studying ion channels.

The optical tweezers day began with an overview covering the rapid development of the technique from Professor Heinrich Hoerber of the University of Bristol.

Subsequent applications presentations highlighted how optical tweezers sheds new light on the dynamics of cellular and molecular processes.

Dr Remus Dame from Leiden University described how to unravel the organisation of chromatin.

The talk from Dr Satish Rao from ICFO in Barcelona described how optical tweezers can be coupled with Raman spectroscopy to follow biosystem dynamics. – Laboratorytalk