Bio-Photonics

Biophotonics is currently a very active and promising field of research aimed at making progress in life sciences through novel photonic technologies. By its very nature, biophotonics requires an interdisciplinary symbiosis of photonics and life sciences. Scientific questions from the life sciences drive forward the development of novel photonic techniques, while progress in the life sciences can be achieved through the use of such photonic techniques. Optical imaging, including advanced light microscopy, is an important biophotonics subarea with a wide range of applications. Research of the Bio-Photonic Imaging Group is therefore focused on developing novel biophotonic imaging methods, as well as their application to pharmaceutical and biomedical problems.
The Bio-Photonic Imaging Group, headed by Prof. Kevin Braeckmans, mainly specializes in microscopy based imaging methods for studying dynamic events quantitatively on the nano- and microscale: time-lapse epi-fluorescence and confocal microscopy, fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP), fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) and single particle tracking (SPT). In many cases we are developing new or improved versions of these techniques for specific applications.
The importance of bio-photonic research is reflected in the recent decision that nano- and biophotonics will be one of the five ‘multidisciplinary research partnerships ’ at Ghent University in the period 2010-2015. To this end, the Centre for Nano- and Biophotonics [link to www.nb-photonics.ugent.be] was established of which the Bio-Photonic Imaging Group is one of the founding partners.