Sharing and reusing cell image data

The rapid growth in content and complexity of cell image data creates an opportunity for synergy between experimental and computational scientists. Sharing microscopy data enables computational scientists to develop algorithms and tools for data analysis, integration, and mining. These tools can be applied by experimentalists to promote hypothesis-generation and discovery. We are now at the dawn of this revolution: infrastructure is being developed for data standardization, deposition, sharing, and analysis; some journals and funding agencies mandate data deposition; data journals publish high-content microscopy data sets; quantification becomes standard in scientific publications; new analytic tools are being developed and dispatched to the community; and huge data sets are being generated by individual labs and philanthropic initiatives. In this Perspective, I reflect on sharing and reusing cell image data and the opportunities that will come along with it.