Web tools for large-scale 3D biological images and atlases.

Background: Large-scale volumetric biomedical image data of three or more dimensions are a significant challenge for distributed browsing and visualisation. Many images now exceed 10GB which for most users is too large to handle in terms of computer RAM and network bandwidth. This is aggravated when users need to access tens or hundreds of such images from an archive.

The Virtual Fly Brain browser and query interface.

Motivation: Sources of neuroscience data in Drosophila are diverse and disparate making integrated search and retrieval difficult. A major obstacle to this is the lack of a comprehensive and logically structured anatomical framework and an intuitive interface.

Results: We present an online resource that provides a convenient way to study and query fly brain anatomy, expression and genetic data.

A high-resolution anatomical atlas of the transcriptome in the mouse embryo.

Ascertaining when and where genes are expressed is of crucial importance to understanding or predicting the physiological role of genes and proteins and how they interact to form the complex networks that underlie organ development and function. It is, therefore, crucial to determine on a genome-wide level, the spatio-temporal gene expression profiles at cellular resolution. This information is provided by colorimetric RNA in situ hybridization that can elucidate expression of genes in their native context and does so at cellular resolution.