Submitting image data to VFB
What image data VFB can take, how to get it to us, and what happens after you send it.
If you have a dataset that could be useful to the community, we would like to hear about it, and the earlier the better.
There is no upload form. Datasets vary a lot in size, format and licensing, so we start with an email and then arrange a transfer to suit what you have.
Start by emailing us
Write to data@virtualflybrain.org. A short description is enough to get the conversation going, but the following will save a round trip:
- What the data is: expression patterns, single neurons, lineage clones, an EM reconstruction, a new template, or something else.
- Roughly how many images, and the approximate total size.
- How it was imaged (confocal, light-sheet, EM) and at what resolution.
- Whether it is registered, and if so to which template. If it is not registered yet, say so. See registering your images, and ask us before you start if you are unsure which template to target.
- The associated paper or preprint, with a DOI if there is one.
- The licence, or what terms you want the data released under. We need terms that allow us to redistribute the images through VFB.
- Who to contact about the dataset.
Use data@, not support@
data@virtualflybrain.org is a private address that reaches the VFB curation team.
support@virtualflybrain.org goes to a
publicly archived Google Group. Please don’t send
unpublished or embargoed data, or anything you would not want indexed, to that address.What happens next
We will reply with advice on whether the data is a good fit and what we need alongside it, and set up a transfer route sized to the dataset. Small sets can go by a shared link; for larger ones we will arrange something separately.
Curation then brings the images into VFB’s coordinate space and ontology so they can be found, overlaid and compared with everything else on the site. We record and display the provenance of every image, so your dataset stays attributed to you and to the paper it came from.
Contact us early
The best time to get in touch is while you are still planning the experiment. Choices made at the bench affect whether an image can be registered at all: which counterstain you use, what voxel size you image at, whether the whole brain is in the frame. These are all awkward to revisit once the data exists.
If you have already generated a dataset we can still help. Send us what you have and we will tell you what is possible with it.
See also
- Registering your images: how to align your stacks to a standard template.
- Templates: the template brains VFB uses.
- Contact us: other ways to reach the VFB team.