Welcome to Day Three at FACSS 2009

Welcome to Day 3, the final day of Spectroscopy’s coverage from FACSS 2009 in Louisville, Kentucky. We hope you’ve had a productive week of networking and science, and we also hope that you’ve found this daily meeting report to be a helpful resource as you’ve navigated the week. However, before everyone begins their travels homeward or toward their next destination tonight or tomorrow, there is still a lot to do and see.

Your best bet today might be the session “Inorganic Nanoparticles for Biological and Biomedical Applications,” scheduled for 10:15 am and featuring presentations dealing with advances in tissue analysis, biomedical diagnoses, and more. One of the highlights of this session should be “Silver nanoparticles for molecular probing of cells, tissues, and organs by SERS and their toxicological effects” by Ioana Pavel and Dawn Wooley, Wright State University, and Zofia Gagnon, Marist College. Here the authors present a novel approach to monitoring the bioaccumulation and toxicological effects of silver nanoparticles in cells, plants, and animal tissues, and utilize surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy to probe subcellular compartments. Along with this fascinating work, this session will feature presentations on gold nanocages, the use of gold quantum dots as biological probes, and more, showcasing the many emerging applications of spectroscopy, and particularly Raman spectroscopy, in the biological and biomedical fields.

Finally, we’d like to take this opportunity to wish you safe travels wherever you may be headed at the end of this week. It has been our pleasure to bring you these meeting reports, and please look for more conference coverage like this coming up in 2010.