Towards reproducibility of microscopy experiments.

Abstract

The rapid evolution of various technologies in different scientific disciplines has led to the generation of large volumes of high dimensional data. Studies have shown that most of the published work is not reproducible due to the non-availability of the datasets, code, algorithm, workflow, software, and technologies used for the underlying experiments. The lack of sufficient documentation and the deficit of data sharing among particular research communities have made it extremely difficult to reproduce scientific experiments. In this article, we propose a methodology enhancing the reproducibility of scientific experiments in the domain of microscopy techniques. Though our approach addresses the specific requirements of an interdisciplinary team of scientists from experimental biology to store, manage, and reproduce the workflow of their research experiments, it can also be extended to the requirements of other scientific communities. We present a proof of concept of a central storage system that is based on OMERO (Allan et al., Nature Methods 9, 245-253, 2012). We discuss the criteria and attributes needed for reproducibility of microscopy experiments.