The 16th International Workshop on Single Molecule Spectroscopy (SMS) and Ultra Sensitive Analysis in the Life Sciences, held Sept. 15 to 17 and sponsored by PicoQuant GmbH, brought together international top researchers in the field of ultrasensitive optical detection and single molecule spectroscopy and microscopy. More than 150 participants enjoyed 45 talks, including lectures given by renowned scientists like Steven A. Soper, Paul R. Selvin and Gerhard J. Schütz. During the poster session, which included more than 50 scientific posters, participants discussed latest results. Informal gatherings during the reception and a dinner led to fruitful discussions about new ideas, projects and networks. Attendees view a selection of posters presented at the 2010 International Workshop on Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Ultra Sensitive Analysis in the Life Sciences. This year’s workshop focused on the current state of the art and recent news in the area of techniques, data analysis and applications based on single molecule spectroscopy. Special highlights were the presentations on multispot FCS by Meike Kloster (Grenoble, France), 3-D tracking by Matthew D. Lew (Stanford, Calif.), nuclear pore complex by David Grünwald (Delft, the Netherlands) and chaperone-assisted folding by Hagen Hofmann, (Zurich, Switzerland). Because super-resolution imaging still is a hot topic, two sessions were dedicated to applications such as PALM, dSTORM, STED, SOFI, PhiLM and DSOM. The talks of John Eid (Menlo Park, Calif.) and Soper (Baton Rouge, La.) even showed how single-molecule techniques already can be used in nonuniversity laboratory analysis (DNA sequencing) and in clinical diagnosis. As in previous years, PicoQuant awarded a special prize for the best student talk, intending to support young scientists and to encourage them to present their work. Due to the high quality of the talks, the nomination of a single winner proved to be difficult. Finally, the jury awarded the prize of €750 to Lisa Marshall (Cambridge, Mass.) who gave a talk titled “Extending single-molecule spectroscopy to nanosecond through millisecond time scales.” The workshop closed with Soper’s brief review of single-molecule analysis through the 16 years of experience of the PicoQuant workshop. His short statistics on papers, speakers and participants showed that, although the number of speakers and posters has only slightly grown over the years, the number of participants has increased strongly, reaching more than 150 in each of the past two years. This indicates an increasing interest in the topics of the workshop. Soper also pointed out evolutions in the topics. While ten years ago, DNA sequencing was a hot topic of active research, this has become an industrial tool as demonstrated this year by the talk of Eid, who works at Pacific Biosciences of California Inc. “PicoQuant’s workshop has surely perpetuated the research in single molecule spectroscopy over the last 16 years,” Soper said. The aim of PicoQuant’s Workshop on Single-Molecule Spectroscopy is to provide an interdisciplinary platform for users as well as developers from physics, chemistry and biology to share their experience, exchange information and report their recent findings and developments in the rapidly evolving field of ultrasensitive optical detection and microscopy down to the single-molecule level. In 2011, the workshop takes place from September 7 to 9 in Berlin-Adlershof, Germany. Founded in 1996, PicoQuant is a research and development company in the field of optoelectronics. The company specializes in the field of single photon counting applications, and offers a product line that includes pulsed diode lasers and LEDs, photon-counting instrumentation, fluorescence lifetime spectrometers and time-resolved confocal microscopes. For more information, visit: www.picoquant.com