An international scientific team, including postdoc Shubham Gautam from bullab (FZP CZU), has developed a revolutionary method for high-performance 3D imaging of insects. Synchrotron X-ray microtomography allows scientists to look inside ants, an ecologically dominant group of insects, in record time and in unprecedented detail, imaging individual muscle fibers or key subregions of the brain. The team scanned approximately 2,200 individuals from almost 800 ant species, representing more than 60% of the known morphologic diversity of ants, and thus created an unprecedented 3D open library called Antscan (https://www.antscan.info). The groundbreaking study was published in the prestigious journal Nature Methods and the results were also published in the journal Science.
“Our method uses cutting-edge technologies in X-ray imaging and robotics to start a big data revolution in the field of morphology and anatomy of organisms. What used to take hours can now be done in minutes, while maintaining top-quality 3D imaging,” explains Shubham Gautam.
For ecologists and evolutionary biologists, this advance represents a huge leap forward. Faster scanning allows for the analysis of a large number of samples in a short time, which is crucial for studying global biodiversity and describing new species. In addition, the authors have decided to make the tool available to the entire scientific community as open source. “This dataset could also be very useful for educators and artists to develop more realistic models of these insects for teaching, or perhaps even for video games and films,” Gautam added.
Video: Animated 3D models of Discothyrea sexarticulata (specialist predator of arthropod eggs), Eciton hamatum (army ant), and Paraponera clavata (the formidable bullet ant), rendered at life-scale proportions to showcase dramatic differences in size, form, and ecological strategy.
Citation: Katzke, J., Hita Garcia, F., Lösel, P.D. et al. High-throughput phenomics of global ant biodiversity. Nat Methods (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-026-03005-0
