France BioImaging was present at the ASCB 2016 meeting in San Francisco (December 3-7).  It was a great occasion to present our infrastructure on our booth and to draw future strategies in BioImaging for Cell and Development Biology.

We also interacted with scientific organizations and funders, such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute,  the National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to whom we presented our R&D programs as well as the overall FBI organization. Most of them were amazed by what we could propose and surely other meetings and new programs could emerge from those informal although in depth discussions.

Beyond the above type of contacts, young scientists were attracted by FBI possibilities in terms of training capacity, accessibility to the most emerging technologies, software platform and lots of them were asking about FBI PhD and Post-doc programs. Certainly a prospect we could mine in the future.

As a general feedback on what were the active new fields of interest in the scientific area of the congress, let us mention the obvious developments in the Biology of Induced Pluripotent stem Cell (IPCs), CRISPR/Cas genome editing techniques, cell mechanics approaches and structure/function of macromolecular complexes in living cell and organisms. It is clear that FBI anticipation in developing super-resolution, optogenetics, multi-scale and highly sensitive imaging techniques will best serve our research teams focusing their interest in these diverse fields.

Finally, as many of our foreigner colleagues mentioned, attendance of French researchers was quite remarkable at ASCB this year. A number of them gave talks that were highly appreciated. A majority of them were coming from the direct perimeter of the FBI Nodes and clearly benefited from or even participated to the development of advanced technologies in imaging provided by France BioImaging.