Abstract
Despite the importance of data resources in genomics and structural biology, until now there has been no central archive for biological data for all imaging modalities. The BioImage Archive is a new data resource at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) designed to fill this gap. It accepts bioimaging data associated with publication in any format, from any imaging modality at any scale, as well as reference datasets. The BioImage Archive will improve reproducibility of published studies that derive results from image data. In addition, providing reference datasets to the scientific community reduces duplication of effort and allows downstream analysis to focus on a consistent set of data. The BioImage Archive will also help to generate new insights through reuse of existing data to answer new biological questions, or provision of training, testing and benchmarking data for image analysis tool development. The Archive is available at https://www.ebi.ac.uk/bioimage-archive/.
Highlights
The BioImage Archive is a new archival data resource at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI).
The BioImage Archive aims to accept all biological imaging data associated with peer-reviewed publications using microscopy that probe biological structure, mechanism and dynamics, as well as other important datasets that can serve as a reference.
The BioImage Archive aims to maximise the use of valuable microscopy data, to improve reproducibility of published results that rely on image data, and to facilitate development of both novel biological insights from existing data and new image analysis methods.
The BioImage Archive anchors an ecosystem of related databases, supporting those resources with storage infrastructure, linkage and indexing across databases.
Across this ecosystem, the BioImage Archive already stores and provides access to over one petabyte of image data from many different imaging modalities and biological domains.
Future development of the BioImage Archive will support the fast-emerging next generation file formats (NGFFs) for bioimaging data, providing access mechanisms tailored toward unlocking the power of modern AI-based image-analysis approaches.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
