OME-Zarr: a cloud-optimized bioimaging file format with international community support.

Josh Moore Daniela Basurto-Lozada Sébastien Besson John A Bogovic Jackson M Brown Jean-Marie Burel Gustavo de Medeiros Erin E DielDavid GaultSatrajit S Ghosh Ilan Gold Yaroslav O Halchenko Matthew Hartley David Horsfall Mark S Keller Mark Kittisopikul Gabor Kovacs Aybüke Küpcü Yoldaş Albane le Tournoulx de la Villegeorges Tong Li Prisca LiberaliMelissa LinkertDominik Lindner Joel Lüthi Jeremy Maitlin-Shepard Trevor Manz Matthew McCormick Khaled Mohamed William Moore Buğra Özdemir Constantin Pape Lucas Pelkmans Martin Prete Tobias Pietzsch Stephan Preibisch Norman Rzepka David R Stirling Jonathan Striebel Christian Tischer Daniel M Toloudis Petr Walczysko Alan M Watson Frances Wong Kevin A Yamauchi Omer Ali Bayraktar Muzlifah A Haniffa Stephan Saalfeld Jason R Swedlow

Published in: bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology (2023)

A growing community is constructing a next-generation file format (NGFF) for bioimaging to overcome problems of scalability and heterogeneity. Organized by the Open Microscopy Environment (OME), individuals and institutes across diverse modalities facing these problems have designed a format specification process (OME-NGFF) to address these needs. This paper brings together a wide range of those community members to describe the format itself - OME-Zarr - along with tools and data resources available today to increase FAIR access and remove barriers in the scientific process. The current momentum offers an opportunity to unify a key component of the bioimaging domain - the file format that underlies so many personal, institutional, and global data management and analysis tasks.

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