The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) hosted their Neuroinformatics Assembly on 19 ^th -23 ^rd April 2021. This conference aims to highlight open innovation in neuroscience, and additionally to showcase recently developed software tools and data infrastructures.

The dizzying complexity of biological systems necessitates an abundance of tools that allow researchers to understand the deluge of sequence, structural, and systems-level data that is being generated in cell, molecular, and developmental biology.

EMBL Heidelberg was the venue for the EMBL Symposium: Seeing is Believing – Imaging the Molecular Processes of Life that took place on 9-12 October 2019. This was the second EMBL meeting on imaging data we attending this year after VIZBI (see the write-up here), GigaScience Data Scientist Chris Armit was there and was astonished at how recent breakthroughs in imaging technology are enlightening our understanding of the Life Sciences.

The diffraction limit of a microscope hinders the ability to see single molecules as the optics do not allow the researcher to distinguish between two fluorescently labelled molecules that are less than 200nm apart. As a means of overcoming this barrier, super-resolution microscopy utilises various tricks to go beyond the diffraction limit and image sub-cellular nanostructure in cells and tissues.

I just got back from attending the IBRO World Congress in Florence and the CNS*2011 meeting in Stockholm.  All I can say is: lucky me. Okay, clearly that’s not all I can say.  They were both wonderful meetings and it was great to see so much good neuroscience going on.  IBRO had quite the turnout with 4,200 people attending this year.