BETHESDA, MD, SEPTEMBER 1, 2011–The American Society for Cell Biology's (ASCB) online library of downloadable cell images has won The Scientist's 2011 Readers' Choice Award for favorite website. The Scientist announced that ASCB's The Cell: An Image Library had come top in the Readers' Choice poll with 1,072 votes, beating out the runner up by 284.
Winning the "Labby" award comes on the heels of the ASCB image library's first anniversary, a year in which 3,000 searchable images were posted, attracting 65,000 visits from 157 countries. Funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), "The Cell: An Image Library" was created by the ASCB in collaboration with Glencoe Software and the Open Microscopy Environment (OME).
The ASCB was awarded a $2.5 million stimulus grant in 2009 through NIH's Grand Opportunities program to build a novel multi-dimensional image library of scientific images of cells and their constituents and processes. This online resource of digital images is freely available to multiple end users—researchers, clinicians, educators, students, and the public—internationally. The rapidly-growing library is available at http://www.cellimagelibrary.org and currently houses over 3,250 searchable images and over 4,750 total images. Investigators from around the world have contributed image data-single frames, multi-dimensional stacks, and time -lapse videos. The repository is still growing and welcomes contributions.
Information on The Scientist's "Labby Awards" is available at http://the-scientist.com/2011/06/15/2011-labby-website-finalists/
Editors: A downloadable cell image to use with this story is at: http://cellimagelibrary.org/images/7439
Caption: Fluorescent protein markers light up mouse fibroblast cells. This is one of more than 3,000 annotated images available for free downloading by researchers and the public at www.cellimagelibrary.org.