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
54th meeting, 8th of September 2025
Meeting date
08/09/2025 @ 5:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
Agenda
- Organizational matters and News
- Update on NBO-Q camera model & glossary
- Updates after the summer break (paper, automation…)
- Decide on next priorities
The meeting welcomed new member Kemp Watson and covered organizational updates from the steering committee, including various project developments and upcoming meetings scheduled for October and November. The working group discussed their focus on detection system performance, including camera models and standardized terminology for microscopy systems, while also addressing the progress of a manuscript related to protocol series. The team reviewed developments of the Nikon toolkit and discussed next steps for their project, including the sequential completion of camera work before moving to other detector types.
53rd meeting, 23rd of June 2025
Meeting date
23/06/2025 @ 5:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
Agenda
- Organizational matters and News
- Report from ELMI 2025
- Update on NBO-Q camera model & glossary
- Report from paper working group
- Next steps
The meeting opened with updates from SC and WG7 meetings, including a report from the NBO-Q camera model and glossary project.
Encouraging news was provided about Nature Publishing Group implementing reproducibility checklists inspired by QUAREP-LiMi’s work. These were mentioned in three recent editorials across major journals. However, concerns were raised as essential information is still missing. A broader conversation on FAIR data sharing followed, highlighting the need to better recognize the cost and effort of data acquisition. QUAREP is encouraged to engage more actively in this direction.
Feedback from ELMI 2025 was very positive—QUAREP-led workshops were well attended and sparked interest among participants, many of whom were new to the initiative. This encouraged us to strengthen our outreach efforts for future international meetings, including next year’s ELMI.
Finally, the paper working group is drafting a publication outlining the foundation of the WG2 protocols. While initial writing has begun, broader input is needed. Future publishing plans for the automation tool and data samples will depend on the setup of OMERO and collaboration with companies.
52nd meeting, 12th of May 2025
Meeting date
12/05/2025 @ 5:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
Agenda
- Organizational matters and News
- QUAREP-LiMi ELMI 2025 workshop contribution
- Report from OMERO subgroup meeting
- Update on NBO-Q camera model & glossary
- Report from paper working group
- Next steps
Summary
We started the meeting with discussing our summer meeting scenario. Due to a public holiday and ELMI 2025, we decided to shift our June meeting to June 23rd. In addition, we decided to skip the meetings in July and August to have time for finishing the camera model and glossary, work on the paper, and have time for vacation. We decided to start again with the regular meeting schedule on September 8th.
This summer meeting organisation was followed by a report from the May steering committee meeting. One great news for WG2 was that the SC endorsed the terminology “dexel” for the detector element versus “pixel” as picture element. Next, we briefly discussed the current status of our ELMI workshop preparation.
This was followed by a report from the QUAREP-LiMi OMERO subgroup meeting. A naming convention was introduced by that subgroup, which everybody needs to follow. We discussed how to implement our spreadsheet terms and how to best automate the upload to OMERO. The WG2 co-chairs will look over tags and naming structure for WG2.
This discussion was followed by an update from the NBO-Q camera model and glossary group. The stakeholder group finished working on the hardware part and will now continue with the settings. The plan is to be finished by the end of this summer.
The WG2 paper working group reported from their first meeting where they summarised paper-related content from our past meeting minutes.
We finalised the meeting with summarising the next steps: finalise the NBO-Q camera model and glossary, work on our paper and collect data for it, support WG7 in their work to calibration metadata, and generalise the automation of our WG2 protocols collection to have it eventually working on all microscopy platforms.
51st meeting, 14th of April 2025
Meeting date
14/04/2025 @ 5:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
After discussing possible scenarios for our WG2 work during summer, we reported from the SC meeting on April 1st. This was followed by a detailed report from the Annual QUAREP-LiMi Meeting that took place April 10th.
The ELMI contribution preparation team reported the submission of three workshop abstracts. Approval was expected to be highly likely (by now all our submitted workshops have been accepted).
The NBO-Q camera glossary team could report that the hardware part is finished! Next, the settings part will be tackled, but is not expected to take that long. The rest of the meeting we spend on collecting topics for WG2 to work on in the future: automation for our WG2 protocols, paper to accompany our WG2 protocol collection, collect data for it, NBO-Q model update for point detectors, amongst others. For each of these topics we need to find people to take the lead and define respective time lines.
50th meeting, 10th of March 2025
Meeting date
10/03/2025 @ 5:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
Agenda points
- Organizational matters and News
- Report from the Annual QUAREP-LiMi meeting
- ELMI 2025 workshop contribution
- Update on NBO-Q camera model & glossary
- Next steps
Summary
This meeting was a bit of a house-keeping meeting. After the report from the March SC meeting we briefly discusses our planned contributions to the Annual QUAREP-LiMi meeting. This was followed by setting up a time line and preparation group for organising our contribution to ELMI2025. Next, we had a quick update on the current status of our NBO-Q camera model and glossary project. We closed the meeting with discussing the next projects we need to tackle. We will first focus on preparing our paper and organising collection of data. We will also have to revisit our long-term goals as next big projects.49th meeting, 10th of February 2025
Meeting date
10/02/2025 @ 5:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
This was our first meeting since the publication of our WG2 Protocols collection. Therefore, our main focus was to discuss the next steps for our work.
We agreed on a key concern: how to collect data now that the protocol is available, and how we can assist users in automating the data collection process for use with the analysis tool. We agreed to use OMERO as our main tool. However, this will require significant work. We need to have an easy way to upload data to the OMERO server. Secondly, we need to determine the metadata necessary to support the main detector parameters that can be analysed using our published protocol tools.
Secondly, we got an update on the progress of the Camera Glossary and Model work. The hardware part is almost done. This will be followed by working on the settings part.
Finally, we decided to use the exciting possibility to present our Protocols collection by offering one or two workshops in the community room during the ELMI meeting in June 2025 in Heidelberg.
Working Group 3
Working Group 4
49th meeting, 16th of September 2025
Meeting date
16/09/2025 @ 5:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
LacJ updated the group on the latest news from QUAREP-LiMi. The group then discussed the results and the discussion section of the protocol, and it was agreed to include the data obtained using MetroloJ_QC, where the experimental distance is normalized to the reference distance. The group also addressed the naming convention, in light of the new data being generated for both widefield (WF) and spinning disk confocal (SDC) systems.
48th meeting, 17h of June 2025
Meeting date
17/06/2025 @ 5:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
LacJ presented a report from the last SC meeting. AzeM informed the group that a new OB representative is needed. The group discussed the recent modifications to the protocol made by DauA and agreed on the next steps to finalize it: DauA and AzeM will collaborate on developing the discussion section. It was also decided to begin acquiring new datasets using widefield (WF) and spinning disk confocal (SDC) systems. A new batch of slides containing 1 µm TetraSpeck beads will be sent to those interested in acquiring images. The group will take a summer break in July and August, with the next meeting scheduled for September 16th.
46th meeting, 15th of April 2025
Meeting date
15/04/2025 @ 5:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
WG04 members began the meeting by discussing feedback from the annual meeting. The author list on protocols.io was also addressed, and it was agreed that all co-authors should enter their full institutional address in the affiliation section under the “Organization” sub-tab.
The group also discussed the upload of WG04 data into OMERO and reviewed the adopted naming conventions.
Regarding next steps, members agreed to move forward with improving the first version of the WG04 protocol. The immediate goal is to adapt the protocol for use on confocal spinning disk and widefield microscopy systems.
44th meeting, 18th of February 2025
Meeting date
18/02/2025 @ 5:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
In the latest WG04 meeting, members reviewed the feedback received from a co-chair of another WG on the first version of the protocol. Final adjustments were discussed and agreed upon to refine the document before publication. Additionally, the group addressed authorship matters, ensuring proper acknowledgment of contributions and clarifying the necessary updates to affiliations on protocols.io.
Working Group 5
62st meeting, 9th of July 2026
Meeting date
09/07/2026 @ 3:30 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
Meeting covered volunteers for elected posts, ELMI feedback, OMERO upload catch up and data collected so far to determine best bead size for ISM based systems. Lastly, a presentation from an intern at the French metrology group detailing software development for identifying aberrant PSFs.
Working Group 6
Working Group 7
20th meeting, 20th of February 2023
Meeting date
20/02/2023 @ 5:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
During the meeting we discussed the following items:
1) Next meeting will be held on March 20th 2023 and then we will continue every two months on the 3rd Monday.
2) Reminders will be sent 1 month, 1 week, 1 day, and 1 hour before each meeting.
3) The work of the WG will continue to concentrate on revising the 4DN-BINA-OME Microscopy Metadata Model and, as much as possible, will attempt to maintain compatibility with REMBI as a high-level set of recommendations.
4) WG7 works to collect the requirements of all WGs and create a consensus that incorporates the metadata requirements of all other WGs. As such WG7 works as an underlying platform on which all other WGs can build. It is important that we do a better job to explain to the QUAREP’s community that our work should be conceived as spanning across multiple WGs.
5) We need a general map of all components of the model, how they relate to each other, and which is the responsibility of which WGs
6) WG7 would like to have time during the annual meeting to discuss with everyone on this!
18th meeting, 21st of November 2022
Meeting date
21/11/2022 @ 5:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
Caterina reported that all the to-do items from last meeting have been completed. Created a granular task list based on what are tasks identified in each of the Sub-Groups and a link to spreadsheet was added to WG7 mainpage. In addition a proposal was tabled to announce QUAREP-WG7 meetings on Image.sc and it was agreed at the meeting. Ken reported the OME-Meeting on Metadata. Josh’s talk can be found here https://www.openmicroscopy.org/events/ome-community-meeting-2022/ · Great material for advocating about the need of a NG Metadata framework, although no clear definition of storage location. There were much discussion of Nature Methods and Nature Cell Biology request to QUAREP-LiMi to develop a light microscopy checklist for Nature Portfolio. Caterina reported back that we had initial meeting with Rita and Melina to discuss Nature requirements and initial meeting with WG7, 9, 11 and 12 chairs to dicuss next steps. We aim to provide the checklist by Christmas to Nature Methods. Nature is not going to release the data, but something that they will like to work and discuss with their editors.
Working Group 8
14th meeting, 23rd of April 2025
Meeting date
23/04/2025 @ 4:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
Summary (topics discussed): Presented and discussed objectives and survey, provided feedback from GerBI, who saw the survey. Sylvia and Gaby showed the latest changes made to the survey. Asked for more contributions (links were shared again). Angela suggested also we have someone more expert on surveys go through the questions (especially making it quantifiable through better structured Likert scales?).
Once this is sorted the Gaby sends a preview of the survey to all QUAREP for final feedback, on the spirit of opening to all community before going public with results.
We ten plan for a date for releasing if and when there is consensus.
Ask also to vote on whether we can/should ask for email (as optional, never mandatory!).
Working Group 9
Working Group 10
41st meeting, 09th of December 2025
Meeting date
09/12/2025 @ 4:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
Discussion about dexel definition work between WG2, WG7 and WG10;
Raw image definition paper V0.8: What‘s new? What remins to be done? Proofreading and assignment of tasks. Target publication date, timeline and help (all)
40th meeting, 14th of October 2025
Meeting date
14/10/2025 @ 4:00 PM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
Discussion about Pixel vs Dexel definitions. Validation of the document.
Presentation by John Oreopoulos (Andor) about methods to measure internal scan head background levels, discussions.
Working Group 11
46th meeting, 03rd March 2026
Meeting date
05/03/2026 @ 11:03 AM (CET/CEST)
Meeting summary
Decide on next chair (Chloe’s torch bearer)
Ayse: Discuss her idea of IA she is working on
Define what depends on application means.
QUAREP-endorsed MicCheck?
Review the modalities we already discussed to ensure we are still ok with them.