About EMPIAR

EMPIAR, the Electron Microscopy Public Image Archive, is a public resource for raw, 2D electron microscopy images. Here, you can browse, upload, download and reprocess the thousands of raw, 2D images used to build a 3D structure.

The purpose of EMPIAR is to provide an easy access to the state-of-the-art raw data to facilitate methods development and validation, which will lead to better 3D structures. It complements the Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB), where 3D images are stored, and uses the fault-tolerant Aspera platform for data transfers. EMPIAR is based on input from the EM community, notably at two key workshops organized by Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe) and The Open Microscopy Environment (OME) - Data Management Challenges in Three-dimensional EM (Patwardhan et al., Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol. 19, 1203-1207 (2012)) and A 3D Cellular Context for the Macromolecular World (Patwardhan et al., Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol. 21, 841-845 (2014)).

EMPIAR accession codes

Accession codes for EMPIAR entries have the format: EMPIAR-#####, e.g., EMPIAR-10009. Please use the accession code in this format when citing EMPIAR entries; your support in maintaining consistency will greatly aid discoverability of entries on the web and in full-text articles.

Current file size of EMPIAR

Update: 2024-03-26, Number of entries: 1626, Total file size: 3.58 PB

EMPIAR DOI

Individual EMPIAR entries have DOI assigned that link to the corresponding entry page. These DOI have the following format:
https://dx.doi.org/10.6019/EMPIAR-#####, e.g., https://dx.doi.org/10.6019/EMPIAR-10016.

Citing EMPIAR

Please cite the following paper in papers and on websites: A. Iudin, P.K. Korir, J. Salavert-Torres, G.J. Kleywegt & A. Patwardhan. "EMPIAR: A public archive for raw electron microscopy image data." Nature Methods 13 (2016). https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.3806. See also the EMBL-EBI press releases of 21 March 2016 here and here. To cite individual entries, please quote the EMPIAR accession code (see above - you can also use the DOI to provide a direct link to the entry) and cite the original publication.

Funding

The work on EMPIAR is funded by a project grant awarded to PDBe by MRC and BBSRC. It further benefits from funding from the Wellcome Trust and EMBL-EBI to PDBe.

Ito F, Alvarez-Cabrera AL, Liu S, Yang H, Shiriaeva A, Zhou ZH, Chen XS. (2023)
Rigden DJ, Fernández XM. (2023)
Iudin A, Korir PK, Somasundharam S, Weyand S, Cattavitello C, Fonseca N, Salih O, Kleywegt GJ, Patwardhan A. (2023)
Serra Lleti JM, Steyer AM, Schieber NL, Neumann B, Tischer C, Hilsenstein V, Holtstrom M, Unrau D, Kirmse R, Lucocq JM, Pepperkok R, Schwab Y. (2023)
Caldwell BJ, Norris AS, Karbowski CF, Wiegand AM, Wysocki VH, Bell CE. (2022)