Handling Digital Images and Videos

Images form a vital part of the scientific record, and the significance of microscopy images for determining the spatio-temporal expression of gene products cannot be over-estimated. Yet an appropriate image bioinformatics infrastructure has until recently been lacking. We recently requested a beautiful confocal image that a colleague had collected some years ago while a graduate student in Heidelberg. His reply typifies the wasteful fate of an unfortunately large proportion of biological research images, and is perhaps the best possible argument for a publicly funded image database that can provide free access to and a safe repository for such images: “Concerning the image data you requested- this is a tough one. The image was recorded about ten years ago, and I never managed to write a paper about the work so it was never published. The original data (if they still exist) must be on some magneto-optical disk in one of many boxes in my flat- quite hopeless to find at short notice. All I can promise is that I’ll look into this once I am back from my travels – but that will take a few months. Whether anyone still has hardware capable of reading the disc is quite another matter! Sorry about this.” I will discuss our creation of the BioImage Database (www.bioimage.org), funded by the EC ORIEL Projec