NCMIR's newly installed "BioWall" tiled display, a 20-tile wall of high-resolution flat-panel displays that project massive, detailed 2D and 3D images of the brain, allows scientists to explore relationships among subcellular components, cells, and cellular networks at unprecedented resolution. Using this technology, neuroscientists can investigate fine details of biological structure and macromolecular distributions across animal models of the whole brain.

The BioWall, which supports 40 megapixels and measures five monitors across and four monitors high, was developed with support from collaborators at Cal-(IT)², OptIPuter, and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) .

Data is taken from NCMIR's laser scanning multiphoton and confocal microscopes and delivered to the OptIPuter storage cluster nearby. From there it flows via optical fiber cables to the BioWall visualization panels, powered by Sun Java™ Workstations, NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics, and partner technologies.

The display also was recently highlighted in a Sun Microsystems, Inc. press release detailing the wide range of fields in which Sun Java ™ workstations find application, including document management, software development, and the structural biology research conducted at NCMIR.

The above image is an example of a brain map developed by NCMIR scientist Tom Deerinck and displayed using the BioWall. This large-scale 3D dataset of a rat's brain is composed of more than 43,000 separate images and measures up to 200 GB at full resolution. The BioWall allows researchers to magnify and examine various areas of these datasets. In this example, staining is used to identify distributions of glial cell intermediate filament protein (red), an intracellular calcium channel enriched in Purkinje cells (green), and a DNA stain (blue).