Conference report: update on Probe Discovery World Congress 2009.

The conference was the first of its kind in a series of trend-setting conferences conceived and organized by Select Biosciences. The word 'probe' is a broad term that can be interpreted to mean any one of a wide variety of agents. These include active chemistries discovered in academic screening laboratories or in government organizations (Molecular Libraries Probe Production Centers Network or the US NIH), commercially available probes (i.e., dyes, antibodies or fluorescent proteins), failed drug candidates from the pharmaceutical industry, whole-body or cellular imaging agents, specific biomarkers or tool molecules from chemogenomics and/or systems biology efforts. The conference attendees represented academia, biotech and pharma, the speaker list was stellar, and the conference organizers succeeded in bringing together all of the various incarnations of probe hunters in order to share their experiences and to network with a common purpose.