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Caterina Strambio-De-Castillia

Nature Methods volume 18, page 1413 (2021)Cite this article

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Sharing, teaching and singing to bring people together on microscopy standards.

Thus far, it’s been “a strange, unorthodox career path,” says Caterina Strambio-De-Castillia, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Program in Molecular Medicine. She’s an “informational cell biologist,” she says. “I really love doing this, thinking about how to capture information, how to model information.” In her latest papers, Strambio-De-Castillia and colleagues present the software tool Micro-Meta App1 to help users more easily capture microscopy metadata, such as the microscope manufacturer or numerical aperture used. This data capture is aligned with community guidelines, the focus of another paper2; the latter presents light microscopy metadata specifications that extend the Open Microscopy Environment (OME) data model to include the needs of the 4D Nucleome consortium, BioImaging North America (BINA) and Quality Assessment and Reproducibility for Instruments & Images in Light Microscopy (QUAREP-LiMi). The OME data model organizes information and makes it easier to relate aspects of a microscopy-based experiment to other data. Bio-Formats, which the OME developed, is software with which labs read and write image data in an open, standardized format. The OME approach has been a start, she says, not an end point.

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References

  1. Hammer, M. et al. Towards community-driven metadata standards for light microscopy: tiered specifications extending the OME model. Nat. Methods https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-021-01327-9 (2021).

  2. Rigano, A. et al Micro-Meta App: an interactive tool for collecting microscopy metadata based on community-driven specifications. Nat. Methods https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-021-01315-z (2021).

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    Vivien Marx

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Correspondence to Vivien Marx.

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Marx, V. Caterina Strambio-De-Castillia. Nat Methods 18, 1413 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-021-01342-w

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