‘Big picture’ breakthrough

Scientists at Dundee University have discovered that aggregating image data from laboratories around the world could revolutionise research.

A team headed by Professor Jason Swedlow in the university’s School of Life Sciences built the Image Data Resource (IDR), a public database that collects and integrates imaging data published in leading scientific journals.

This means data from imaging experiments conducted by scientists all over the world now publicly available.

Professor Swedlow said: “Researchers collaborate with each other and keep abreast with research work from the global scientific community at meetings and in published papers, but the image datasets that underpin these communications are almost never published.

“IDR makes these datasets available and allows scientists worldwide to combine, mine and analyse these imaging data.”

Using IDR, Professor Swedlow and his colleagues in the Open Microscopy Environment Consortium found connections between different research projects that had eluded individual researchers until now.

They identified genes from different studies that, when mutated or removed, caused cells to elongate.

The research is published in the journal Nature Methods.