Bio's starring role at CLEO 2015

Of the eight plenary sessions at the 2015 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO; May 10-15, San Jose, CA), four focused on bioimaging. One of the four Nobel Laureate speakers, Steven Chu, stated, "We are in the midst of a revolution in optical and electron microscopy—a revolution that will have an intense effect on biology, biomedicine, and bioengineering for years to come."

Similarly, of the four focal areas covered in the Applications and Technology track, the one titled Biomedical Applications offered the greatest number of invited talks. Five of these 12 presentations featured optical coherence tomography (OCT), and described both technology innovations and applications. Other topics included optogenetics, medical lasers, multispectral and multiphoton imaging, and point-of-care.

Other bio-wows at CLEO 2015 include a new optical attachment from Aydogan Ozcan's lab at UCLA that turns a smartphone into a fluorescence microscope able to image and size DNA molecules; a trillion frame-per-second camera developed by the University of Tokyo and colleagues that can acquire 25 sequential images in a shot, and promises to help researchers see changes in living cells, communication between cells, and detect precursor cancer cells and neuron activity; and the Random Raman Laser, a narrow-band strobe light source for speckle-free bioimaging by Brett Hokr and colleagues at Texas A&M.