Integrated Microscopy and Proteomics

The Challenge

Australian researchers have long been trying to understand the precise molecular makeup of the intracellular environment.

The Response

The Integrated Microscopy and Proteomics (IMP) project used artificial intelligence bioinformatics approaches to seamlessly integrate and interrogate high-resolution imaging data (derived from optical and electron microscopy and X-ray crystallography) with proteomic/genomic data and gene ontology/protein interaction network data. 

The project has enabled a new, publicly accessible, national-scale data asset to underpin the integration of molecular imaging with bioanalytics, driving discovery research across the whole of the life sciences. 

The resulting online platform hosts the final, released and annotated datasets and permit presentation of the data to the community. 

This work will have immediate application in fields such as drug discovery, infectious diseases and molecular diagnostics.

The project involved the following elements:

• collection of comprehensive protein and electron microscopy (EM) data across numerous disparate community and facility databases
• integration of molecular imaging and bio-analytics and application of published approaches – including artificial intelligence tools – to process, segment and label EM tomograms and populate with the appropriate metadata
• tailored data asset publicly available through a robust resource for multimodal imaging data storage and visualisation, a resource to integrate and visualise omics data with multimodal imaging, and a curated, labelled and FAIR public, web-based repository of data.

Who Will Benefit

The IMP project has immediate application for researchers, research organisations and the biotechnology and imaging and analytics instrumentation industry. 

Researchers, research organisations and the biotechnology and imaging and analytics instrumentation industry will benefit from the project’s core features:

The Partners

Our partners are: 

• EMBL Australia
• Microscopy Australia
• Bioplatforms Australia
• Monash University.