Computer-based three-dimensional visualization of developmental gene expression.

A detailed spatio-temporal analysis of embryonic gene expression will likely reveal the actual role of developmental genes in controlling morphological organization. This calls for reliable tools that can visualize high-resolution gene-expression patterns in a 3D morphogenetic context. At the same time, this graphical information should be permanently stored in a digital format, to be universally accessible via the Internet and directly linked with sequence and text-format gene databases 1,2 . The analysis of organismal structures by sectioning techniques has always suffered from the loss of 3D information of the details visible in single microscopic images and has led to the development of numerous reconstruction methods (refs 3‐21 and