A new study mapping immune cell motility across organs and conditions is published in EMBO Journal. This work is a collaboration between the González Group at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB, an Institute affiliated with USI Università della Svizzera italiana) and the Pizzagalli and Krause Group at the Euler Institute and supported by SNSF/swissuniversities, it provides an Open Data resource centralizing microscopy data from an international consortium.
Intravital microscopy enables the direct observation of cellular behavior over time, offering tissue-to-subcellular resolution in vivo. However, most of these data remain confined to individual laboratories, limiting data reuse, standardization, and large-scale comparative analyses. To overcome these challenges, we present Immunemap, an open-data platform and interactive atlas of immune cell motility. Immunemap currently provides access to over 58,000 manually curated single-cell tracks and more than one million cell-centroid annotations from more than 400 intravital videos, with contributions spanning various anatomical compartments and experimental conditions. Immunemap supports both exploratory and quantitative research: we demonstrate how large-scale mapping across conditions enables comparison of immune cell behavior under different stimuli, imaging settings, or tissue environments. Thanks to its cloud-based architecture, Immunemap offers an interactive web interface for researchers and a programmatic access, facilitating its integration into computational workflows. Beyond supporting immunological discovery, the platform serves as a benchmark for bioimage analysis, including training and testing of tracking and detection algorithms. In addition, by adhering to FAIR principles and fostering interoperability between immunology, imaging, and data science communities, Immunemap promotes reproducible research and standardized protocols in intravital imaging.
