David Orloff & The Cell – An Image Library

What is your background?

I received my B.S. in Biochemistry at the University of Maryland. Immediately after that I went to work at the Protein Information Resource, one of the early databases of protein structure. I returned to school at The George Washington University where I obtained my M.B.A. in the Management of Science, Technology, and Innovation. I then worked at the American Chemical Society in their book publishing department for a little while. I then joined the US Peace Corps and taught Accounting and Economics in Samoa. After some other experiences outside the realm of science, I returned to manage the launch of the new The Cell: An Image Library.

What is the Cell: An image library?

Simply put The Cell is a public repository of microscopy data.

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How can scientists take advantage of this library?

There are many ways a scientist can take advantage of The Cell. One obvious use is  for the organization and archiving of their own data. Additionally, there are many funding bodies that now require all research generated under a grant be publicly available and not just the data presented in papers. Instead of developing systems for complying with this demand, cellular images can be submitted to The Cell. With some of our new tools, some of which are still in development, researchers can tag images for later use and will be able to share images with other select users, which could be the start of collaboration, possibly with someone you find using The Cell. There are also many images to choose from when you need a highly illustrative image for a presentation.

Why you started this project?

This project was started under an ARRA grant from NIGMS to develop the infrastructure for a central repository of cellular images for research by researchers, educators, students, and the public. Having a central place to find these images is invaluable. The goal was to build something equivalent to the nucleic acid and protein sequence databases, but with images, videos, and animations of cells.

What is the future of The Cell?

The immediate future of The Cell is to complete the integration with the Cell Centered Database (CCDB), another image repository located at UC San Diego. This involves creating additional tools for the interface, as well as creating the linkages to the back end system so that all CCDB data can be found in The Cell. Additionally, we intend to continue building on our relationship with the Neuroscience Information Framework to further enhance our ability to federate with other image databases. This, of course, works both ways. We are looking for partners to help us populate the database with images and also for other websites to integrate our images into their systems.

What is your vision for The Cell?

I have very large vision for The Cell. Ultimately, I see it as being part of a much larger integrated network where scientists would store and analyze their raw image data and even write their articles. They could use the system to send the articles to publishers while at the same time tagging their datasets to go to the appropriate public database. The Cell would be that database for all microscopy images. Unpublished images would be immediately available and published images would be tagged to be available after the publisher’s embargo period.

The Cell itself would enable users to share images publicly and privately, archive images for later analysis and would include a full range of tools in a toolbox that would enable researchers to analyze images and sets of images as they are doing their research. This toolbox will be a key feature in the future. As part of this, there are plans to introduce Microsoft’s Silverlight Pivotviewer. This will allow an entirely different and very visual approach to analyzing large numbers of high definition images for similarities and differences.

In addition to the vision of The Cell for the researcher, the body of information we have gathered will be very useful for educators, students, and the lay public. There are a number of ways this could take shape, starting with basic explanations of the various cell components and cell processes. This is already in the works.

What is the next step?

What is really needed at this stage is for scientists to continue submitting their images to The Cell. See this page for more information or contact David Orloff (dorloff [at] ascb.org). Please also let David know of any interesting ways you have used The Cell.

How can someone get involved?

To follow along with The Cell community and learn of new developments, please join one or more of these social media groups:

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Image of the Week.