Next week, Dot and I will be heading to Edinburgh to attend the Select Biosciences Single Cell Analysis Europe conference.  These days, the analysis of single cells is being increasingly applied to get to the bottom of experimental questions in biology, and is a rapidly expanding discipline, rich in methodological advances.  We are really looking forward to hearing about the techniques currently being used, as well as discovering new methods that are now being developed.

The conference will run over two days, 28^th-29^th March, and covers the use of microarrays, microfluidics and label-free approaches to study single cells, as well as the use of RT-qPCR in single cell analysis, among other topics.  Keynote lectures will be given by Norman Dovichi and Marcus Textor, and two of our very own Nature Protocols authors, Jay Groves and Nicholas Navin.  Although our single nucleus sequencing protocol from the latter is only just in production at the moment, we have a Nature protocol from the Groves lab. that describes the use of supported membranes and single-cell microscopy to investigate cell signalling. We also have a Nature protocol on RT-PCR data analysis from Kenneth Livak, which is relevant to his upcoming talk at this conference, and a Nature protocol from Susann Müller who will be speaking there too, describing how to use microbial community dynamics as a biosensor.

In advance of our attendance, we have put together a collection of our single-cell protocols for your interest, which will be free to access for the rest of this month, alongside those from our authors who will be speaking.  While this is only an example of our content on this topic, you will see that the protocols cover a range of areas from gene expression and copy number profiling to isolation and imaging of single cells and we hope that you will find them useful!

In addition, conference registration also allows entrance to three other concurrent meetings; the Lab-on-a-chip European Congress, Advances in Microarray Technology, and Advances in Biodetection & Biosensors.  Nature Protocols authors are again represented amongst the speakers at these meetings, with Mark Bradley (protocol in production), Andreu Llobera and Bo Mattiasson all giving talks.  As you can see, these meetings are also highly relevant to our scope and content at Nature Protocols so we are keen to make it to some of these sesions too.  There are only two of us, but we will aim to get to as many of the talks as we can and will bring you some reports shortly after our return!