High-throughput phenomics of global ant biodiversity

The big data era in biology is underway, but the study of organismal form has been slow to capitalize on advances in imaging and computation. Modern imaging can digitize whole organisms, but low throughput has limited the effort to document morphological diversity. Within the open science initiative ‘Antscan’, we applied high-throughput synchrotron X-ray microtomography to capture phenotypes across a diverse and ecologically dominant insect group — ants. We provide 2193 whole-body 3D ant datasets from 792 species to broadly cover the ant phylogeny with a global scope, also pairing phenomic data with genome sequencing projects.

Scans acquired with standardized parameters facilitate automated analysis and free access to data can broaden the audience and incentivize methods development. Antscan presents a scalable approach to create libraries of diverse anatomies, heralding a new era of studies on the evolution, structure, and function of organismal phenotypes.