JCB 271 The Rockefeller University Press

One of the major forces driving the birth of the field of cell biology was the appli-cation of electron microscopy to cells. Today, virtual nanoscopy has brought electron microscopy and the cell biology community to a new frontier in biologi-cal imaging and cell biological inquiry. The Journal of Cell Biology is pleased to announce that the JCB DataViewer is “going big ” to host electron microscopy data at a whole new scale. A new frontier: Gigapixel images at nanometer resolution The field of cell biology emerged in the 1950s with the ability to observe—at nanometer resolution—cellular structures and their interconnections through the electron microscope. Electron micros-copy continues to be a valuable tool for cell biological studies today. However, a limitation of this technology is the small field of view captured in a single image—only on the scale of a few microns square. Although these high-magnification images provide impressive resolution of the selected area of the cell, they are often difficult to put into the broader biological context of a cell or tissue. On the other hand, overview images taken at a lower magnification help to present the big pic-ture but lack cellular detail. Recent technological developments have enabled the integration of imaging and computational tools to allow “virtual nanoscopy, ” the visualization of speci-mens at nanometer resolution but milli-meter scale, a scale unheard of just a few years ago. These approaches allow the seamless zooming in and out—from sub-cellular- to tissue- or even organism-level views—without loss of resolution (Fig. 1). In the current issue of JCB, Faas et al. (2012) describe automated image acqui-sition and stitching technology using a standard laboratory transmission electron microscopy platform to generate large-scale electron microscopy datasets. By accurately stitching together more than 26,000 individual images at nanometer resolution, they generated virtual slides up to 1.5 mm (921,600 pixels) × 0.6 mm (380,928 pixels) for a total of 281 gigapix-el