Working Group 1
Quality Assessment and Reproducibility for Instruments & Images in Light Microscopy
The Consortium for Quality Assessment and Reproducibility for Instruments and Images in Light Microscopy (QUAREP-LiMi), formed by the global community of practitioners, researchers, developers, service providers, funders, publishers, policy makers and industry related to the use of light microscopy, is committed to democratizing access to quantitative and reproducible light microscopy and the data generated by it.
Our mission is to provide a comprehensive set of community-agreed guidelines, protocols, automation procedures and other resources aimed at improving quality control, quality assurance, and instrument/method calibration. The stakeholders advocate for the use of the highest level of reproducibility for data generated by light microscopy methods in scientific research and biotechnology applications. In support of achieving its mission, QUAREP-LiMi:
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sanctions Working Groups to form teams that focus on specific technical or outreach topics;
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maintains, disseminates, and teaches best practices, protocols, and software tools; and
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collaborates with providers of reference materials or instrumentation or other tools that enable the easy implementation of best practices at the community level.
We came together in our first online Web meeting on the 28th of April, 2020, with about 50 attendees. By now (24st of April 2024), the network has grown to 620 people from 41 countries worldwide. We have members from academia (research labs, core facilities), national microscopy communities, companies involved in the microscopy business, organizations or institutions related to standardization on a national or international level, and scientific publishers and observers from funding agencies (see the graph below and on the member page for an overview).
Ten working groups (WGs) were established in the 2nd General Meeting on the 9th of July 2020 to bring our common aims quickly forward. Our web page gives an overview of QUAREP-LiMi’s work. In the 3rd General Meeting, WG 11 “Microscopy Publication Standards” and later WGs 12 “Image Visualization and Analysis” and 13 “Phototoxicity” were established. WG 14 “Environment” and 15 “FLIM” are in the process of being established, and WG 8 is restructured to work on “Education, Training and Outreach”.
QUAREP-LiMi operates a NextCloud and an OMERO server, serving as a centralized repository and exchange point for our collective work. These platforms facilitate collaboration and data sharing among our members.
QUAREP-LiMi is absolutely open to new members, and we are looking forward to your contribution. If you are interested in joining our initiative, please fill out our membership form. Use our form for changing your working group (WG) or joining a new WG. For any further questions, please contact us.
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Working Group 2
12th meeting, 11th of October 2021
Meeting summary
One of the main topics of our meeting was to prepare for the joint meeting with WG7 on establishing standardized vocabulary for describing cameras. The idea for this meeting is to bring together camera manufacturers, microscope companies, and users to agree upon the vocabulary.
In addition, we have to test and finalize both, our measurement and the analysis protocols, by generating more data for determination of the photo-conversion factor (PCF) and background. For that we agreed to use a de-focused Chroma slide edge as main test sample for now.
Last, we discussed how to get more members actively involved and keep the active ones motivated.
11th meeting, 13th of September 2021
Meeting summary
This was the first meeting after the summer break. Therefore we mainly did a status update of the current standing of WG2 and our 4 subgroups (area detector, point detector, analysis, test samples). Mainly, first data sets were collected using the first versions of our measurement protocols. Also, we have a first version of a stand-alone analysis program for retrieving of the photon-conversion factor and dark noise contribution. We discussed the documentation and organization of the data and meta data collected, how to improve it, and how to interact with the MetaDataApp.
Working Group 3
Working Group 4
10th meeting, 19th of October 2021
Meeting summary
We are currently generating data in several locations and with several different confocal microscopes of the WG4 members. We defined three workflows to analyze the data with the aim to specify contributions of the analysis workflow on the results. We decided to use the suggestions (Meta App) from WG7 (metadata) to save all our metadata. Matadata will be extremely important to discuss our results, thus we established a set of metadata important for WG4 and collect them in a table for future analysis.
Working Group 5
Working Group 6
Working Group 7
12th meeting, 21st of February 2022
Meeting date
21/02/2022 @ 5:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
In this meeting we discussed:
- Revision of the WG7 main webpage on QUAREP.org
- Review progress done with WG2 to revise the Camera section of 4DN-BINA-OME-(QUAREP) Microscopy Metadata model in collaboration with Camera manufacturers and members of the Camera community.
- Review progress of SubGroup 2 (Metadata Education) and SubGroup 3 (Metadata Storage Specifications).
- Reminder: the novel SubGroup 4 (Model Revision) was formed but it did not convene yet because they are waiting for the end of the first phase of Camera community conversations. Please join us in this important work.