It is becoming a tradition: Three successful EMBO practical courses on light sheet microscopy in 2014, 2016, and 2018 inspired this new edition of the course, which took place August 11-22, 2025, at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden. Organizer Pavel Tomancak, with co-organizers Emmanuel Reynaud (Da Vinci Labs), Sebastian Bundschuh (MPI-CBG), Marina Cuenca (EMBL Barcelona), and Olaf Selchow (freelancer), invited 16 students, 13 experienced instructors, 15 high-profile speakers, and 10 companies with a total of 14 different microscopes and two image processing servers on site.

Light sheet microscopy opens new avenues to study biological processes with unprecedented imaging speed or full coverage of entire organs and organisms. However, researchers require advanced training to meet the technological and computational challenges of light sheet microscopy. The highly interdisciplinary course covered diverse aspects of light sheet microscopy, including sample preparation, microscope assembly, physics of the light sheet, long-term live imaging, image processing, high-performance computing, and IT challenges of big image data.

Commercial as well as homemade setups were made available for the students to get familiar with the various flavors of light sheet technology. The highlight of this year’s light sheet hardware line-up was the Flamingo Light Sheet system developed by a former MPI-CBG group leader, Jan Huisken.

From model species like zebrafish to Arabidopsis plants, the students unleashed the available light sheet systems on a wide range of samples. Throughout the course, all samples were imaged using light sheet technology, producing more than 80 terabytes of raw image data. Processing, visualizing, and analyzing this data was a large part of the course and often lasted until the early morning hours.