The Visible Embryo Project is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary research project to develop such a large-scale distributed computational resource "center" to support research, education, and health care relating to developmental biology. A primary goal of this project is to provide a testbed for the development of new technologies, and the refinement of existing ones, for the application of high-speed, high-performance computing and communications to current problems in biomedical science.
This project will serve the dual purpose of providing a testbed for new technology development in high performance computing and communications, as well as creating powerful new tools for the developmental biology research community. New advances in visualization technology are beginning to allow investigators to break through previous technical imitations and discover universally-applicable rules for pattern formation and shape development in organisms. By applying these new technologies to the existing archives of cross-sectional image information that exist in the literature and in collections around the world, we can tap into an enormous amount of new information that can be extracted from these databases.