Scialog: Advancing BioImaging Holds Inaugural Meeting
More than 50 early-career chemists, physicists, biologists, bioengineers and medical imaging specialists gathered online May 20-21, 2021, for the inaugural meeting of Scialog: Advancing BioImaging, a three-year initiative that aims to accelerate the development of the next generation of imaging technologies.
Sponsored by Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation, the initiative is designed to create a multidisciplinary community to identify challenges, envision research opportunities that could enable major advances in imaging technologies, and to award seed funding to collaborative projects with the potential for deep impact.
“Together, your ideas can help determine where the field will go,” RCSA President & CEO Daniel Linzer told participants. “RCSA and our partners believe that through this kind of collaboration and conversation, we can advance science and the careers of young scientists with decades of promising research ahead of them.”
Scialog, short for “science + dialog,” was created by RCSA in 2010 to bring together scientists from a variety of disciplines to focus their collective thinking on issues of global importance. By maximizing interactions between researchers with different experience and approaches, and who might not normally meet or work together, the process aims to spark highly creative and novel ideas for transformative research.
“Our intent is for this Scialog to help participants gain new insights and connections that significantly advance the fundamental science of imaging to study tissues at cellular or sub-cellular resolution, and to do it across spatial and temporal domains,” said RCSA Program Director Andrew Feig.
Jin Zhang, professor of pharmacology, chemistry and biochemistry, and biomedical engineering at the University of California, San Diego, shared the results of her lab’s work on imaging kinase networks in living systems during her keynote presentation, “Illuminating the Biochemical Activity Architecture Across Scales.”
Her work showed that imaging science can now develop tools that go beyond simply visualizing structures to follow a variety of cellular activities, leaving a trail of evidence regarding how biochemical activities, in this case kinases, become activated and deactivated across cellular networks. Such work opens up possibilities to think about how to engineer probes and imaging systems that can simultaneously image cellular structures, distribution of macromolecules and metabolites, and biological function. This can be done through multiplexing one type of imaging as Zhang did, or combining orthogonal imaging modalities.
After the keynote, nine expert Facilitators guided participants in a series of breakout discussions to identify gaps in fundamental understanding and brainstorm new ideas for research. Less-structured opportunities for networking and conversation followed, enabling participants to find potential partners for research and to form teams to write proposals together.
Teams will submit proposals a week following the conference, and awards are expected to be announced in June.
The second meeting of Scialog: Advancing BioImaging is scheduled for May 19-22, 2022, in Tucson, Arizona.
RCSA will launch two other new Scialog initiatives this year, Signatures of Life in the Universe in June and Mitigating Zoonotic Threats in September. Other ongoing Scialog initiatives are: Chemical Machinery of the Cell; Microbiome, Neurobiology and Disease; and Negative Emissions Science.
