The BioImage Archive – Building a Home for Life-Sciences Microscopy Data

Despite the huge impact 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. In its initial development BioImage Archive accepts bioimaging data associated with publications, in any format, from any imaging modality from the molecular to the organism scale, excluding medical imaging. The BioImage Archive will ensure reproducibility of published studies that derive results from image data and reduce duplication of effort. Most importantly, the BioImage Archive will help scientists to generate new insights through reuse of existing data to answer new biological questions, and provision of training, testing and benchmarking data for development of tools for image analysis. The archive is available at https://www.ebi.ac.uk/bioimage-archive/.HighlightsThe 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 approaches that probe biological structure, mechanism and dynamics, as well as other important datasets that can serve as reference examples for particular biological or technical domains.The BioImage Archive aims to encourage the use of valuable imaging data, to improve reproducibility of published results that rely on image data, and to facilitate extraction of novel biological insights from existing data and development of new image analysis methods.The BioImage Archive forms the foundation for an ecosystem of related databases, supporting those resources with storage infrastructure and indexing across databases.Across this ecosystem, the BioImage Archive already stores and provides access to over 1.5 petabytes 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 modern visualisation and data exploration tools, as well as unlocking the power of modern AI-based image-analysis approaches.