The “Antscan” web platform is the world’s largest digital database of 3D insect data. It is the result of an international and interdisciplinary cooperation initiated by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan. The project combines innovative 3D imaging, optimized data processing, and artificial intelligence (AI). The platform is freely accessible to researchers, teachers, and the interested public. Publication in the Nature Methods scientific journal. (DOI: 10.1038/s41592-026-03005-0).
Insects are by far the largest group of organisms on Earth. They play an important role in our ecosystems and serve as models for biomimetic technologies that mimic biological structures. Large scientific collections of insects are fundamental not only for documenting their species and populations, but also for understanding the interplay between morphology, i.e. the outer form and inner anatomy, physiology, and genetics as well as the origin of biodiversity. Furthermore, they enable the monitoring of the effects of environmental and climate influences. With the Antscan platform, researchers have leveraged international and interdisciplinary collaboration to create the largest digital database with 3D data of insects worldwide. It is freely accessible to researchers, teachers, and the interested public. Antscan is the result of a joint initiative of KIT and OIST in Onna / Japan.
14,000 Ant Species Are Known to Date
Antscan is a pilot project that has the goal of generating digitized 3D images of a large number of insects in a short time. The platform currently focuses on ants, but the project design can be adapted to other small invertebrates. “Ants constitute the ideal starting point for our project,” says Dr. Thomas van de Kamp, coordinator for biological X-ray imaging from KIT’s Institute for Photon Science and Synchrotron Radiation (IPS), who is one of the Antscan initiators. “They are distributed all over the world and occupy many ecological niches. More than 14,000 ant species have been described, but there are probably a few thousands more. An enormous morphological diversity is found among these species.” In order to make this diversity accessible, Antscan combines innovative 3D imaging, optimized data processing, and AI.
The researchers collected approximately 2,200 ants preserved in alcohol from museums and private collections from all over the world. The state of preservation of their anatomy is so good that even the morphology of the soft tissues can be digitized. For the imaging process, the scientists used synchrotron-based microcomputer tomography, which does not use a conventional X-ray tube as the source of radiation, but a so-called synchrotron, i.e. a special type of particle accelerator. It generates intense X-rays so that very high-resolution and high-contrast imaging is possible. The KIT Light Source available at KIT operates a tomography equipment with a very high throughput, complemented by fast robots and high-speed cameras. The Antscan team was thus able to X-ray the ants and to capture the raw data in just a few days. Then, the 3D images were reconstructed automatically from the recorded projections.
Antscan Succeeds in Linking Molecular and Morphological Data
The whole lot of “digital ants” were stored on the infrastructure of KIT’s scientific datacenter and published via the RADAR4KIT service. The interactive database, which is directly linked to an image analysis platform (Biomedisa), also contains 3D surface previews and interactive models. In Antscan, 3D data records and detailed metadata are available for every scanned sample. Each entry includes the taxonomic rank, ecological information, geographic details, and the genome sequencing status. “We aligned Antscan with large-scale genome sequencing projects by targeting ants from related species or even scanned ants from the same nest series that were sampled for these projects,” says Van de Kamp. “This way, we obtained an important link between molecular and morphological data.” Antscan enables us to investigate biodiversity and the relationship between shape, genome variation, and environment in a new way.
Original publication
Julian Katzke et al.: High-throughput phenomics of global ant biodiversity. Nature Methods, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41592-026-03005-0
Antscan Project Website
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