Digital Drosophila

by Phillip Barnes

After years of recording the size, shape, and veins of drosophila melanogaster wings on paper during morphological research experiments, Professor Barnes developed a new workflow to digitally capture the wings at high resolution, creating a large dataset of these images in collaboration with his student researchers. This digital process yields richer information that Barnes and his students can use in future studies, expanding the original intent of the experiment and making data available that other researchers may be able to use.

The project website currently in development will share the collection and metadata with researchers well beyond Barnes’s own field of research with the hope of enabling multidisciplinary collaborations.