In this work we address the problem of information access that arises in the held of three-dimensional structure determination, by means of image processing, from data obtained by various types of microscopy. A prototype of a distributed database containing three-dimensional structural information is presented, In this database the volume information is linked, if possible, to other sources of catalogued information such as sequence data, atomic coordinates, and bibliographies. The solution we propose is sufficiently general to be applicable to data in other fields of biomedical science. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.